Current Affairs Quiz - January, 2020

Notes:
The ‘Antarrashtriya Yoga Diwas Media Samman’ award was instituted in June 2019, to recognise the contribution of media in spreading Yoga. The first edition of the award is to be conferred to 30 media houses, by the Union Information and Broadcasting Minister Prakash Javadekar. The awards will be presented in three categories, namely ‘Best Media Coverage of Yoga in Newspapers’, ‘Best Media Coverage of Yoga in Television’ and ‘Best Media Coverage of Yoga in Radio’.

Notes:
The Manas National Park is a UNESCO World Heritage site and a biosphere reserve is situated in Assam. Recently a one-horned rhinoceros of the national park named R3A gave birth to its calf. The R3A was also born in the same park to the elder rhino ‘Laisri’ in 2013.
The One-horned rhinoceros or the Indian rhinoceros is an endangered species and is listed as ‘Vulnerable’ in the IUCN Red list of threatened species. At present, the national park is home to 42 rhinos.

Notes:
Automobile Major Hyundai recently unveiled an air electric taxi, developed in collaboration with Uber, in the Consumer Electronics Show 2020.
According to their partnership, Hyundai will develop and deploy vehicles and Uber will provide support service, ground transport connection and customer Interface. Uber is to launch urban commercial flights by 2023 and Hyundai is its first carmaker partner in the project.

Notes:
The State Government of West Bengal has started an environmental-friendly project to save paper. It has also decided to use digital medium for most administrative works. The State Secretariat,Nabanna already follows the method, which will be extended to other districts as well.
The government also proposed to recycle the paper used for administrative purpose, by converting them into writing pads and reusing them. The process is to be continuously monitored by the state secretariat.

Notes:
According to the recent study published in ‘Astrophysical Journal’, Scientists have discovered thirteen huge black holes in some dwarf galaxies. The galaxies are found to be located several light years from the earth and in half of the galaxies, the black holes are not in the centre of the galaxies.
The high-resolution images of the galaxies with black holes were captured using the Very Large Array (VLA) observatory. It is a radio telescope observatory, which is situated in New Mexico, U.S.A. VLA was set up by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

Notes:
In first week of January, 2020 the government has released the first advance estimates of gross domestic product (GDP) growth for 2019-20. The economy will grow at 5% this year, a massive downgrade from the 7% projected by the Economic Survey last year and much lower than the 6.8% growth in the previous year.

Notes:
India’s country’s largest public sector bank, State Bank of India has announced a ‘residential builder finance with buyer guarantee’ (RBBG) scheme. It aims at giving a push to residential sales and improve homebuyers’ confidence. Under this scheme, SBI will issue a guarantee for completion of select residential projects to customers who have availed home loans from it. The scheme will focus on affordable housing projects priced up to 2.50 crore rupee in 10 cities initially.

Notes:
India levies license fees of 8% of adjusted gross revenues (AGR) from every telecom license holder. The SC on October 24 defined AGR as all revenues of a license holder, and not just revenues from telecom services. Apart from dealing a body blow to telcos, the order also made non-telecom companies holding licenses for internal communications and signaling liable to pay license fees on their entire revenue, even when they do not offer any telecom services.

Notes:
The Indian Railways has installed Artificial Intelligence based Facial Recognition Technology in Manmad and Bhusawal stations of Maharashtra and Bengaluru station of Karnataka. The PSU under the Railway Ministry, RailTel carries out the project to provide Video Surveillance System with facial recognition and video analytics.
The Railway Protection Force (RPF) will subsequently link the output of this facial recognition system with their existing criminal database, so that identification of criminals at the Railway station would be made easier.

Notes:
The Father of Green Revolution Dr M S Swaminathan is chosen as the recipient of ‘Muppavarapu Venkaiah Naidu National Award for Excellence’. This award is instituted by the Muppavarapu Foundation based at Hyderabad. Eminent Agricultural Scientist and plant geneticist, M.S. Swaminathan is awarded for his contributions towards the field of agriculture.
This award was presented during the 10th Anniversary Celebrations of Muppavarapu Foundation in Hyderabad by the Vice President of India, Venkiah Naidu.