Current Affairs Quiz - September, 2023

Notes:
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has announced to enhance transaction limits for small value digital payments in offline mode to ₹500 from the earlier cap of ₹200.
These can be made using any channel or instruments such as cards, wallets, mobile devices in face-to-face mode only. Although the upper limit of an offline payment transaction shall be ₹500, the total limit on a payment instrument will be ₹2,000 at any point in time.

Notes:
The President of India, Droupadi Murmu released a postage stamp in memory of Dadi Prakashmani, former chief of Brahma Kumaris at Rashtrapati Bhavan Cultural Centre.
This stamp was released under the ‘My Stamp’ initiative of the Department of Posts, Ministry of Communications to mark the 16th death anniversary of Dadi Prakashmani.

Notes:
Every year on August 29, India celebrates National Sports Day to commemorate the birth anniversary of hockey legend Major Dhyan Chand.
It is also called Rashtriya Khel Divas. The day is dedicated to the country’s sports heroes and champions for their contribution and dedication towards bringing pride to the nation. It aims to raise awareness about the values of sports.

Notes:
The Gujarat government has increased the reservations for Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in the state’s panchayats and urban local bodies from 10% to 27%.
This decision was made based on recommendations of the K.S. Jhaveri Commission, which was formed based on a 2022 Supreme Court order on deciding the level of OBC quotas in Gujarat.

Notes:
Tata Passenger Electric Mobility, a subsidiary of Tata Motors, has announced the introduction of its new brand identity, TATA.ev, for the EV business.
Tata has also revealed a logo for its .ev brand. The .ev brand will be used by Tata Motors’ Passenger Electric Mobility division and it will not cover Tata Motors’ electric commercial vehicles, as of now.

Notes:
NITI Aayog and UNDP India have signed, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to formalise a framework of cooperation on a range of areas, including SDG localisation, data-driven monitoring, Aspirational Districts and Blocks, among others.
The MoU was signed for a period of five years. NITI Aayog is the nodal Institution for coordinating the adoption and monitoring of SDGs at the national and sub-national levels. UNDP plays the integrator role in coordinating efforts to fast-track progress on the SDGs within the UN system.

Notes:
Assam-based Oncologist Ravi Kannan has been named one of the four winners of the 2023 Ramon Magsaysay Award, Asia’s equivalent of the Nobel prize.
He is a recipient of India’s fourth-highest civilian award Padma Shri and the director of Assam’s Cachar Cancer Hospital and Research Centre (CCHRC).

Notes:
10 billion UPI transactions were performed for the first time in August in India, according to data from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which runs the real-time payments platform.
The real-time mobile payment platform is likely to end August with around 10.5 billion transactions with the cumulative value crossing the Rs 15-lakh-crore figure for the second consecutive month.

Notes:
Inception, a unit of Abu Dhabi AI company G42, has released ‘Jais’, the world’s most advanced Arabic large language model.
Jais is a bilingual Arabic-English model that has been trained on a massive dataset of text and code. It can be used for a variety of tasks, such as machine translation, text summarization, and question answering. It was trained on the Condor Galaxy, the world’s largest AI supercomputer, using 116 billion Arabic tokens and 279 billion English tokens.

Notes:
The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), announced the launch of Falcon blockchain-based project named ‘Falcon’.
It is an open-source project that aims to simplify the management and use of blockchains based on ‘Hyperledger Fabric’ and supported on Kubernetes clusters. Essentially, Falcon is expected to help developers innovate on blockchain-based payment solutions.