Current Affairs Quiz - June, 2020

Notes:
The International Cricket Council, ICC has confirmed the interim changes recommended by the cricket committee of the council.
The council chaired by veteran Indian cricketer Anil Kumble has recommended five regulations, which include the ban on the use of saliva to shine the ball and allowing home umpires in international series. It has also decided to allow teams to have a replacement for players in Test matches, who show Covid-19 symptoms.

Notes:
The Union Government has created the Micro Irrigation Fund with the corpus of Rs. 5000 crore with National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD).
Under the fund, NABARD will provide the amount to states on concessional rate of interest to promote micro-irrigation. Moreover, the annual allotment of Rs. 4000 crore has been made under the ‘Per Drop More Crop’ component of Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana (PMKSY- PDMC). The scheme focuses on improving water use efficiency through micro Irrigation techniques.

Notes:
Multinational professional services network Deloitte is partnering with Google cloud to help Indian firms in leveraging digital technology.
The firms have extended their global alliance to India to enable the Indian enterprises modernize cloud technology adoption. It will also provide solutions in field such as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and Contact Center AI.

Notes:
India’s leading digital payments platform PhonePe has partnered with ICICI Lombard to launch the first-of-its kind domestic multi-trip insurance cover.
This comprehensive insurance cover has been exclusively made available for the users of PhonePe. It provides affordable annual insurance cover for unlimited trips. Under this feature, there is no need to insure every trip separately unlike traditional insurance products.

Notes:
The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) is an international agreement between governments. India is also a signatory to CITES. It seeks to ensure that international trade in specimens of wild animals and plants does not threaten their survival.
The Environment ministry has issued rules for dealing with the import of exotic species and for assessing scale of possession within the country, as per the CITES agreement. Exotic live species are defined as plants and animals that are moved from their original habitat to a new one by human intervention.

Notes:
The Chief Minister of Maharashtra Uddhav Thackeray and Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan launched an Integrated Flood Warning System called ‘IFLOWS-Mumbai’.
The warning system has been jointly developed by the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES) and Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC). It would relay alerts of possible flood-prone areas at 6 to 72 hours in advance. After Chennai, Mumbai is only the second city to get such system.

Notes:
The Aquatic Quarantine Facility (AQF), a premier institution of Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Aquaculture, MPEDA, Ministry of Commerce & Industry (RGCA-MPEDA), has received 3,600 numbers of L. vannamei (White-leg shrimp) brood stock imported by India’s shrimp hatchery operators from Hawaii.
The brood-stock were successfully quarantined for five days and handed over to the hatchery operators with 97.12 per cent survival. This has been achieved for the first time since the inception of the Aquatic Quarantine Facility.

Notes:
As per the recent notification from the Department of Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), the annual rate of inflation based on monthly Wholesale Price Index (WPI) contracted to 3.21% in the month of May 2020.
It means that the annual rate of inflation is -3.21% in May 2020. The government had suspended the release of wholesale price index (WPI) data in April, due to the nationwide lockdown. Hence the provisional figures of May are compared with final figures of March.

Notes:
India has recently joined the Global Partnership for Artificial Intelligence (GPAI) as its founding member, along with USA, UK, EU, Australia among others.
Union minister for Electronics and IT Ravi Shankar Prasad announced that this multi-stakeholder international partnership will promote responsible human centric development and use of Artificial Intelligence. India has recently launched the National AI Strategy and also launched its dedicated National AI Portal.

Notes:
Two Indian firms namely ZestMoney and Stellapps feature in the new list of Tech Pioneers released by the World Economic Forum (WEF).
The 100 firms selected as pioneers will be invited to participate at World Economic Forum workshops, events and high-level discussions. Zestmoney offers affordable credit as an alternate to traditional way of finance. Stellapps, is a farm-to-consumer dairy technology solutions company.