Current Affairs Quiz - May, 2020

Notes:
India’s first and only woman Paralympics silver medallist, Deepa Malik is set to take charge as the President of the Paralympic Committee of India.
She had earlier announced her retirement from active sports. She is the only woman para-athlete to have been given the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna award. She is also a recipient of the Padma Shri and Arjuna Award. Deepa Malik won her silver medal at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Summer Paralympics in shot put. She has won 58 national and 23 international medals.

Notes:
Betty Wright, the Grammy winner recently passed away in her hometown Miami, Florida, as per her family sources.
The singer’s real name was Bessie Regina Norris and she was born in 1953. She started her singing career in a musical group called the ‘Echoes of Joy’. The biggest hit of her career was the album named “Clean Up Woman”, which was released when she was eighteen. She won her first Grammy Award for her song, “Where is the Love?”, at the age of 23. She continued her song writing and music production for several years.

Notes:
A team of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and Stanford alumni have developed a technology named “Airlens Minus Corona”. It has received certification from the National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories (NABL).
It is an ‘intelligent robot’ machine that can travel to hospitals and other crowded public places and disinfect surfaces with a water-based technology. Unlike the alcohol-based or UV-based method, the technology works on the basis of ‘Water Electro Activation’ technique. Charged or ionised water droplets will kill the virus by destroying its proteins.

Notes:
The Prime Minister of India recently unveiled a special economic package titled “Atma Nirbhar Bharat Abhiyan” to the tune of Rs. 20 lakh crore. It aims to stimulate the economic activities of the country, ahead of the 4th phase of the lockdown.
The stimulus package also includes Rs 1.7 lakh crore package of free food grains to poor and cash to poor women and elderly, that was announced in the month of March in the name of PM Karib Kalyan Yojana. It also includes the liquidity measures and interest cuts announced by RBI. The Prime Minister said the package will focus on land, labour, liquidity and laws.

Notes:
Recently, the Geographical Indication (GI) tag has been provided to Jharkhand’s Sohrai Khovar painting and Telangana’s Telia Rumal handloom cloth.
The painting is a traditional art that is created by tribal women with locally available soils of different colours. It is predominantly done in Hazaribagh district of Jharkhand. Telia Rumal cloth has intricate handmade work with cotton loom, with designs in red, black and white colours. Thanjavur Netti (pith) works that uses Aeschynomene aspera plant and Arumbavur Wood Carving also got G.I tag from Tamil Nadu.

Notes:
The video-conference of foreign ministers of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) was recently held in the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic. Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar represented India.
SCO has eight member states including namely India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, China, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. The SCO summit which was scheduled to be held in the month of July, 2020 at the Russian city St. Petersburg is expected to be held as per the schedule.

Notes:
As per the recent report by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), nearly 6 Crore Indian workers in the age group of 20-39 lost their jobs in April. It revealed that 12 crore jobs had been lost because of the lockdown.
As per the report, more than 2.7 crore young people in the age group 20-29 lost their jobs last month. Also, more than 3.3 crore people in the age group 30-39 lost their jobs. 11% of the young workers in the age group of 20-24 years, who accounted for 8.5% of total employed people in the country in 2019-20, lost their jobs.

Notes:
In the second tranche of the economic stimulus package, the Finance Minister proposed that the Government will launch a scheme under Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana-PMAY.
The scheme aims at providing ease of living at affordable rent for migrant labour/urban poor. It proposes to convert government funded housing in the cities into Affordable Rental Housing Complexes (ARHC) under PPP mode. The scheme will also incentivize industries and State Government Agencies and Central Government Organizations to develop ARHCs and operate them.

Notes:
The United Nations recently released the World Economic Situation and Prospects report. As per the report, the global gross domestic product (GDP) is estimated to shrink by 3.2 per cent in 2020.
The report also estimated that India would grow by 1.2 per cent by 2020 due to the effect of the national lock-down. UN had already projected a lower growth rate of 4.1 per cent for the year 2019. The organisation also projected that India would slowly regain its growth rate and reach 5.5 per cent in the year 2021.

Notes:
Veteran educationist and litterateur Anisuzzaman, who was also the national Professor of Bangladesh, passed away recently at the age of 83.
He was born in Kolkata and later moved to Bangladesh shortly after the partition of India. He had contributed significantly for the Bangla literature. He also played a crucial role in all democratic movements including the Language Movement of 1952 to Liberation War in 1972 etc. He was awarded Padma Bhushan by India in 2014.