Current Affairs Quiz - January, 2020

Notes:
Union Culture Minister Prahlad Singh Patel inaugurated the country’s first of its kind special exhibition on ‘Indian Heritage in Digital Space’ and a two-day-long first international heritage symposium in New Delhi.
The exhibition was organised in association with Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and it will be made open to the general public for one month. Digital installations of Indian monuments were showcased, which were created under the Indian Digital Heritage (IDH) initiative of the Department of Science and Technology (DST).

Notes:
Western Railway zone of the Indian Railways connects Mumbai, the financial capital of India with Gujarat and some parts of Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, with its headquarters being the Churchgate station of Mumbai.
Alok Kansal, a 1983-batch officer of the Indian Railway Service of Engineers (IRSE) has been recently appointed as the General Manager of the Western Railway zone. The previous General Manager was Anil Kumar Gupta, who retired on November 2019

Notes:
After the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin announced certain constitutional amendments that would extend his powers beyond Presidency, the entire government of Russia resigned. This also includes the Prime Minister of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev.
Putin made this announcement during his annual state of the nation address. He also proposed Mikhail Mishustin, the head of Russia’s tax service as the next Prime Minister. The leaving Prime Minister Medvedev may take on the position of deputy head of Russia’s Security Council.

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.

Notes:
Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) is a statutory body of Union Ministry of Women & Child Development. It is the nodal body for adoption of Indian children and regulation of adoption processes inside the country and within countries. In 2003, the Government of India ratified the Hague Convention on Inter-country Adoption of 1993.
Recently, CARA celebrated its 5th Annual Day in New Delhi and the event was attended by the officials of the Union Ministry of Women & Child Development.

Notes:
Leading Indian tele-com service provider, Bharti Airtel and Google Cloud announced a partnership recently. Through the partnership, Airtel will be able to offer ‘G-suite’ to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in India.
G-Suite is a set of applications which include Gmail, Docs, Drive, Calendar and other productivity tools developed by Google. This agreement would help both the companies to tap growth opportunities in Indian market. As of now, Airtel provides tele-com service to nearly 5 lakh small and medium businesses and several thousand large businesses.

Notes:
The Institute of Company Secretaries of India (ICSI) recently appointed Ashish Garg as its new President for the year 2020. Another member of ICSI, Nagendra D Rao has been elected Vice-President of the Institute. Ashish Garg was elected to the central council of ICSI for the 2015-18 term and has been re-elected for the 2019-22 term.
The Institute of Company Secretaries of India (ICSI) is a New Delhi based statutory body to promote and regulate the profession of company secretaries in India.

Notes:
The 80-year-old Former Indian cricketer and National Selector, Man Mohan Sood recently passed away.
Sood was born on 06-07-1939 in Lahore, Punjab (now in Pakistan), India. He had played one Test match representing India and 39 first-class matches with a century. Man Mohan Sood also had served as an administrator at the Delhi and District Cricket Association (DDCA) and a member of the National Selecting Committee

Notes:
The State government of Uttarakhand recently released a notification that it has made a policy to lease agricultural land, becoming the first Indian state to implement such policy.
According to the policy, any institution, company or NGO can take farm land on lease for 30 years, provided the leased land is below 30 acres. The farmers who own the land will receive the corresponding rent during the leased period. Difficulties in leasing land for agriculture and plantation in hilly areas and consolidation of fragmented land are being solved by the policy.

Notes:
As per the recent announcement from the Indian Army, the first batch of 18 indigenously upgraded ‘Sharang’ artillery guns are to be inducted into the Army by March 31, 2020.
The barrel of the indigenously designed gun has been upgraded from 130 mm to 155 mm. As a result, the hitting range of the gun has been increased by 12 km kilometres, to 39 kilometres. The Gun Carriage Factory (GCF) in Jabalpur had been awarded the global contract for upgrading the Sharang artillery gun, and the project was done with the help of ordnance factories, Indian Army and DRDO.