Monthly Current Affairs Quiz - May, 2017

Notes:
Ajay Tyagi, a 1984 batch IAS officer of the Himachal Pradesh cadre, has become the 9th Chairman of markets regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) for a period of 3-years on March 1, 2017. He succeeded U K Sinha. Prior to this appointment, he has handled capital markets division in the Finance Ministry. Tyagi also has diverse experience at the Centre. He was Joint Secretary in Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change before joining Finance Ministry in November 2014 as Additional Secretary. He has also worked in ministries of Petroleum and Natural Gas, Steel and Rural Development. The chairman of SEBI receives a consolidated pay package of Rs 4.5 lakh per month.

Notes:
Robyn Rihanna Fenty, a Barbadian singer and songwriter, has been conferred with the 2017 Harvard Humanitarian of the Year award in recognition for her work to improve cancer treatment in her home country of Barbados and for setting up a college scholarship to bring Caribbean students to study in the United States. The annual award by the prestigious university is given to an individual whose works and deeds have served to improve the quality of lives and have inspired people to greater heights.

Notes:
P K Purwar has been appointed the new Chairman and Managing Director (CMD) of state-run telecom major Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL). Currently, Purwar is working as Director (Finance) in MTNL, which has been without a full-time CMD since May 31, 2014, following superannuation of A K Garg.

Notes:
The book “Lincoln in the Bardo” has been authored by George Saunders, the Folio prize-winning author. The novel is a tale of death and beyond that captures the grief of Abraham Lincoln over the death of his 11-year-old son Willie while the Civil War raged on in the United States of America (USA). The book draws a parallel line between the lives of Willie’s ghost and a similar uncertain state of Lincoln, after the boy’s death. In simple words, the novel is a confrontation with the mysterious beyond the inevitable death, a question that has haunted humankind, and the way death can bring even the head of a nation to his knees.

Notes:
The International Women’s Day (IWD) is observed every year on March 8 to commemorate the struggle for women’s rights and to highlight the achievements of women while calling for greater equality. The 2017 theme of IWD is “Women in the Changing World of Work: Planet 50-50 by 2030” and its’ campaign theme is “#BeBoldForChange”.

Notes:
Kalika Prasad Bhattacharya (46), the noted Bengali folk music singer, has recently passed away in Hooghly district, West Bengal. Besides popularising folk songs of rural Bengal among the present generation in the albums of his band ‘Dohar’, he had also lent his voice in films like Jaatishwar (2014), Moner Manush (2010) and Bhuban Majhi (2017).

Notes:
The State Bank of India (SBI) has recently launched a new “Work from Home” facility to enable its employees to work while at home using mobile devices to address any urgent requirement they may have, that prevents their travelling to work. SBI will use mobile computing technologies and shall have continuous control over all the enabled devices centrally to manage and secure the data and applications on the mobile devices.

Notes:
Dr. Lalji Singh, who served as dDirector of Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) and vice-chancellor of Banaras Hindu University (BHU), has been selected for ‘SERB Distinguished Fellow’ award by the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), a statutory body of Government of India. The SERB has instituted ‘Distinguished SERB Fellowship Award’ to support research of eminent scientists active even after superannuation. The award carries an amount of Rs. 60,000 per month and a research grant of Rs. 5 lakh. The research grant is for three years and is extendable for a further two years. Currently, Lalji Singh runs the ‘Genome Foundation’, a non-profit company in Hyderabad.

Notes:
Iran has successfully test fired naval strike ballistic missile “Hormuz 2”, which is intended to hit moving targets at sea with high precision and has a range of nearly 300 kilometers (186 miles).

Notes:
The Arunachal Pradesh government has launched a new scheme “Adarsh Gram Yojana” for rural poor. The purpose of the scheme is to reach the poor people in rural areas of the state to serve them better. Under the scheme, 123 villages (comprising one village per circle) will be developed as ‘Model Villages’ during the fiscal year 2017-18. The state government has allocated an amount of Rs.93 crore in the Budget 2017-18 for infrastructure development and for creating employment opportunities and community assets for the people of those villages.