Current Affairs Quiz - January, 2020

Notes:
To commemorate the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, a ten-day art exhibition was recently inaugurated in Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh. The exhibition was named as ‘Gandhi @ 150 Art Exhibition’
The Indian High Commission in Bangladesh organised the exhibition in association with the national cultural centre of Bangladesh, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy. The art products of the Bangladesh artists created during the art camp and photographs of Gandhi were exhibited in the event.

Notes:
India’s leading private sector bank, HDFC bank recently launched a customised group of banking products called ‘myApps’. HDFC Bank offers four categories of applications namely mySociety, myClub, myPrayer and myCity at present.
This application suite will benefit several types of institutions like urban local bodies and societies to digitise their transactions. The users can pay bills or book tickets for several facilities using the app. It has many other features like broadcast messages, report on payments by customers and complaint filing.

Notes:
The 23rd National Youth Festival is to be organised by the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports in Lucknow from January 12 to 16, 2020, in association with the Uttar Pradesh Government. The festival is celebrated to commemorate the birth anniversary of Swami Vivekananda.
Every year, the birthday of the famous Indian monk from Kolkata, Swami Vivekananda is celebrated as the National Youth day on January 12 and the week commencing from the day as the National Youth week. During the youth festival, several competitions are held for the youth and National Youth awards are also presented.

Notes:
The Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi will participate in the interaction program with students named ‘Pariksha Pe Charcha’ scheduled for the year 2020. The event is to be organised at Talkatora Stadium in New Delhi on January 20.
The Human Resources and Development Ministry recently asked for suggestions and questions from students, teachers and parents ahead of the grand event. This is the third edition of the event, where the Prime Minister will meet thousands of students and address them about overcoming examination fear.

Notes:
China recently added a significant bullet train to its Fuxing series of bullet trains. The recently added train is capable to ply with a speed up to 350 kilometres per hour. Another great feature of the train is it could run without a driver for operating the train.
The new train would connect the cities of Beijing and Zhangjiakou and is expected to be deployed during the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. Each seat of the train is furnished with a touch screen and a wireless charging port. The train also features 5G connectivity and removable seats to assist Paralympians.

Notes:
The Armed Forces Veterans Day is celebrated on January 14 every year and was instituted in the year 2017, to commemorate the retirement date of the first Indian Chief of Army Staff, K M Cariappa. He served as the Chief of Army Staff from 1949 to 1953.
The present Indian Army Chief General M M Naravane attended the event organised to observe the Armed Forces Veterans Day and announced that special pensions would be provided to the emergency commissioned and short service commissioned officers who fought in the wars of 1965 and 1971 against Pakistan.

Notes:
The Indian ambassador for Madagascar, Abhay Kumar recently handed over nearly 1 lakh academic text books to the East African country, Madagascar for assisting its development in higher education and research. The books were received by the Minister for Higher Education and Scientific Research of Madagascar, in an event held in its capital city, Antananarivo.
The books were published by the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) and the total cost of the books is nearly 76 lakh rupees.

Notes:
Verizon Media, an arm of the international tele- communication company, Verizon communications, has recently launched a new privacy-focused search engine called ‘OneSearch’.
The search engine claims that the search history of the users will not be stored and the self-destructible search data of the users will not be shared with advertisers. The new search engine is also expected to give unbiased and unfiltered results, which will be personalised only based on locations and will separate IP addresses from users and their search results.

Notes:
The Chief Minister of Maharashtra, Uddhav Thackeray launched the first girder for the Mumbai Trans Harbour Link (MTHL) mega project, along with the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority officials.
The project connects Mumbai to the adjacent Raigad district and is expected to be made operational by 2022. The project entails a cost of nearly ₹18,000 crore and it is financed by a loan from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). The foundation stone for the project was laid by Narendra Modi in 2016.

Notes:
The Uttar Pradesh cabinet recently approved implementation of the commissioner system of policing for its two cities, Lucknow and Noida. The system will give magisterial powers to the top police officers.
After the announcement, IPS officers Sujit Pandey and Alok Singh were named as the commissioners of Lucknow and Noida respectively. A woman police officer of the superintendent-rank has been posted in both Lucknow and Noida to deal with the cases of crime against women. The state cabinet also approved to set up two new police stations in Noida.