Current Affairs Quiz - April, 2021

Notes:
The cherry blossom in Japan generally takes place in the month of April and this has continued since the year 1409.
But this year’s peak bloom arrived on 26 March in Kyoto while in Tokyo the bloom has been since 22 March. As per environmentalists, warmer and earlier springs due to climate change has been the underlying reason for early flower blossom.

Notes:
The Tribal Co-operative Marketing Federation of India (TRIFED) under the Union Ministry of Tribal Affairs has recently launched “Sankalp se Siddhi” – Village & Digital Connect Drive. This drive has commenced on April 1, 2021.
This is a 100-day drive that would include participation of 150 teams and would cover 1500 villages of the country. The main aim of this drive is to activate the van dhan kendras of these villages.

Notes:
A massive data leak has been recently reported on Facebook. Information of about 533 million Facebook users has been leaked online, which includes contact numbers, IDs, birth dates and more personal information.
Among the affected, were the Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other co-founders.

Notes:
The Reserve Bank of India has revised and modified its inflation-forecasting model. This has been done to better capture the relationship between monetary policy and real economic elements.
fiscal-monetary dynamics, fuel pricing, exchange-rate fluctuations etc have been incorporated in the revised model to adjust inflation. This is termed as the Quarterly Projection Model 2.0.

Notes:
The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have planned to launch a dedicated platform that would advise the poor nations on funding their climate and conservation activities.
It is proposed that the platform would consist of UN officials, non-governmental organisations, private investors and rating agencies, to aid and advise the funding activities.

Notes:
India’s net direct tax collection (excluding refunds) for FY 2020-21 stood at Rs.9.45 trillion. This is for the first time in 4 years, the direct tax collection has fallen below Rs 10 trillion mark.
But this year’s actual tax collection is more than the revised estimates by around 4.5 per cent.

Notes:
Domestic consumption of petroleum products in India in FY21 fell 9.1% year-on-year (y-o-y) to 194.7 million tonnes (MT).
The main reason is said to be the low sales of transportation fuel amid the country-wide Covid-19 lockdown. Petroleum sales have fallen for the first time since FY99 and Diesel sales also dipped 11.9%.

Notes:
295 Atal Tinkering Labs (ATLs) across India, which were nurtured and developed by NITI Aayog’s Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) have been adopted officially by Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).
This is seen as an ambitious step in inculcating scientific research culture among students of the country.

Notes:
The finance ministers of G20 nations have given their nod to International Monetary Fund (IMF) for issuing fresh Special Drawing Rights (SDR) amounting $650 billion to G 20 member countries.
This is aimed to boost the reserves of all nations and thereby avoiding low-income countries into get into further distress due to COVOD 19 pandemic.

Notes:
The Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), has celebrated its 71st Foundation Day recently.
At the celebrations in Swami Vivekanand Cultural Centre at Indian Embassy in Beijing, the foundation day celebrations were accompanied by the launch of ‘Little Guru’ app. This is the world’s first Gamified Sanskrit learning App.