Current Affairs Quiz - April, 2023

Notes:
SEBI decided to set up a corporate debt market development fund in the form of an Alternative Investment Fund.
Corporate Debt Market Development Fund will be set up with an initial corpus of Rs 3,000 crore. It will function as a backstop facility for buying investment grade corporate debt securities during stressful times.

Notes:
First Peoples of Australia are people who lived in the Australia’s continental mainland and surrounding islands for tens of thousands of years before the arrival of first Europeans in the early 17th century.
A referendum will be issued this year by the Australian government to alter the Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. It will decide whether these people should be formally consulted in the law making process.

Notes:
The government has raised the interest rates across all small savings schemes except the post office savings deposit and the Public Provident Fund (PPF) for the April-June 2023 quarter.
The Sukanya Samriddhi Account Scheme too will enjoy a higher rate of interest – up from the existing 7.6 percent to 8 percent. The interest rate on the National Savings Certificate (NSC) has been hiked from 7 percent to 7.7 percent for the April – June 2023 quarter.

Notes:
Salar de Atacama is Chile’s largest salt flat. Much of the country’s lithium deposits are found in this region.
Chile is planning to collaborate with India to tap into the lithium value chain. The copper-producing nation- Chile, holds the world’s largest known lithium reserves.

Notes:
India’s Goods and Services Tax (GST) revenue collection for the month of March 2023 is stood at 1.6 lakh crore rupees.
This is 13 percent higher than the GST revenues in the same month of last year. It is for the fourth time, in the current financial year that the gross GST collection has crossed 1.5 lakh crore rupees, since the implementation of GST.

Notes:
The Himachal Pradesh recently repealed the Loktantra Prahari Samman Act.
The Act provides a monthly pension of Rs 20,000 and Rs 12,000 to the people who lodged in jails during the Emergency from 1975 to 1977. The repeal of the Act shall not affect the previous operations of the said Act.

Notes:
Australia, with gender pay gap of 13.3% as of 2023, has launched a new law that mandates firms with over 100 employees to reveal their gender pay gaps by early 2024.
This is expected to make businesses more accountable and improve working conditions of women in the country.

Notes:
NASA named the first woman and the first African-American ever assigned as astronauts to a lunar mission.
Christina Koch, an engineer who already holds the record for the longest continuous spaceflight by a woman, was named as a mission specialist, along with Victor Glover, a U.S. Navy aviator, who was selected as the Artemis II pilot.

Notes:
Regiment of Artillery is the combat support arm of the Indian Army. It is the second largest in size after the Infantry regiment.
Recently, the Indian government gave the approval for the induction of women officers in this regiment.

Notes:
The plasmonic paint makes use of nanoscale structural arrangement of aluminum and aluminum oxide and not traditional pigments to create different colors. It has been recently created by Florida-based researchers.
It is believed to be the lightest paint in the world. It is also the first environmentally friendly, large-scale and multicolor alternative to pigment-based colorants.