Current Affairs Quiz - May, 2020

Notes:
The state government of Uttar Pradesh has recently launched a mobile application called ‘Ayush Kavach-Covid’, which has been developed the Ministry of AYUSH.
The application was launched with an aim of providing health remedies and measures to boost immunity in the process of fighting Covid-19. The app provides a lot of information authorised by the AYUSH Ministry about the medicinal properties of certain ingredients. It also enables the users to seek advice from experts in the AYUSH field.

Notes:
Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury has been reappointed for another year as the chairperson of Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee along with the existing 30 members.
The committee was first formulated as a result of Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms in the year 1921. After 1950, the committee became a parliamentary committee which functioned under the control of the Lok Sabha Speaker along with a non-official chairperson. Since 1967, the chairperson of the committee is selected from the opposition party.

Notes:
Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB), a lab of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) have entered into a partnership to commercialise the FNCAS9 Editor Linked Uniform Detection Assay, FELUDA test kit developed by IGIB.
Under the agreement, the licensing of KNOW-HOW for rapid and accurate diagnosis of COVID-19 will also be undertaken. The FELUDA kit is affordable, easy to use and not dependant on the expensive Q-PCR machines. It uses Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) based technology and paper strip model of chemistry.

Notes:
As per the recent notification of the Reserve Bank of India, the government has appointed Economic Affairs Secretary Tarun Bajaj as a Director on the central board of Reserve Bank of India (RBI), with effect from May 5 until further orders.
Tarun Bajaj is set to replace the position held by Atanu Chakraborty, who superannuated on April 30. Tarun Bajaj is a 1988 batch IAS officer and has held several crucial positions including Additional Secretary in Prime Minister’s Office and Director in the Department of Financial Services.

Notes:
In a recent move, the Centre hiked the duties on petrol and diesel steeply and raised it to Rs 10 and Rs 13 per litre, respectively. It was also announced that there will be no change in the retail prices as the hike will be absorbed by the Oil Marketing companies.
Among the total hike, the Road and infrastructure cess will go the revenue of the Centre only whereas the special additional excise duty will be passed on to all states through devolution at 42%. This decision has been taken at the backdrop of falling crude oil prices in the global market and lower demand during the lock-down.

Notes:
Rabindranath Tagore, also called as the ‘Gurudev’ wrote the ‘Amar Sonar Bangla’ song during the first partition of Bengal, announced by Lord Curzon in 1905. The song later led to the uprising of the freedom movement of the present Bangladesh and became their national anthem.
Tagore is the only known person who had composed national anthems for two countries, including Jana Gana Mana of India. The Sri Lankan national anthem was also inspired from Tagore’s work, as per some historians. His 159th birth anniversary was observed on May 7. National Gallery of Modern Art organised a virtual tour to commemorate the birth anniversary of Tagore.

Notes:
The United Nations celebrates May 7 as the International Day of Vesak across the world, to commemorate the day of enlightenment of Lord Buddha.
In India, Ministry of Culture in collaboration with the International Buddhist Confederation (IBC) held a Virtual Prayer Event to celebrate Buddha Poornima. Indian Prime Minister also delivered the keynote address. The virtual celebrations will be streamed live from various historic sites from India, Nepal and Sri Lanka.

Notes:
French cybersecurity researcher and ethical hacker Robert Baptiste who writes in the pseudonym Elliot Alderson on Twitter, warned about the security issues in the Aarogya Setu application. He also explained how the application could be manipulated to retrieve data of people infected in a given area.
As per the recent announcement of the Indian government, more than 90 million people have downloaded the application. However, the team of Aarogya Setu assured that no data or security breach has been identified.

Notes:
Monaco-headquartered International Association of Athletics Federations leads the celebration of World Athletics Day in the month of May. The first World Athletics Day was celebrated in 1996.
Every year, the date is decided by IAAF and this year it was celebrated on May 7. IAAF was founded at Stockholm, Sweden in the year 1912. The Athletics Day is celebrated to educate the people about the significance of sports and to encourage athletics as the foundational sport in educational institutions.

Notes:
Union Defence Minister Rajnath Singh recently inaugurated the strategically important Ghatiabagar-Lipulekh motor road.
The road connects the last Indian post on the Indo-China border in Uttarakhand’s Vyas valley. The construction of the road commenced in 2008 and was scheduled to be completed in 2013, but it was delayed due to the tough terrain. The Kailash-Mansarovar Yatra from Lipulekh pass is more convenient for pilgrims, after the road has been commissioned.