Current Affairs Quiz - May, 2020

Notes:
The World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) is the United Nations agency responsible for the promotion of sustainable and universally accessible tourism. Its headquarters is located at Madrid, Spain.

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:
The FIFA U-17 Women’s World Cup was originally scheduled to be held in India from November 2-21 in 2020 and was subsequently postponed due to the pandemic.
Recently, FIFA announced that the World Cup tournament has been rescheduled to February 17-March 7, 2021. It was originally planned to be held across five host cities of India namely – Navi Mumbai, Guwahati, Ahmedabad, Kolkata and Bhubaneswar. The original eligibility criteria of the players will be followed.

Notes:
New Development Bank (NDB) was established by the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) countries in 2014. Its headquarters is Shangai and is headed by veteran Indian K V Kamath.
BRICS’ New Development Bank was seen in news recently, as it has provided $1 billion loan to India to fight COVID-19. The complete emergency funds have been disbursed by the development institution, to help India in containing the human and economic losses due to Covid-19.

Notes:
The state government of Odisha has decided to bring three ordinances for strengthening the agriculture economy of the state.
The decision has been taken in a review meeting on controlling Covid-19 and restarting economic activities, chaired by the Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik. The state also announced that MGNREGA and Mission Shakti activities would be intensified. Odisha has started agricultural activities and sale of agricultural inputs.

Notes:
Uttarakhand government has recently launched a portal named ‘HOPE’ – Helping Out People Everywhere, to assist the workers of the state to find suitable employment.
The portal has started to collect data on the youngsters of the state and migrant workers returned from other states. The workers can upload their skill-sets on the website and based on that, they will be able to find suitable jobs at home-state. The data collected will be used for implementing the Mukhyamantri Swarojgar Yojana, implemented by the state earlier.

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 Bengali author Debesh Roy passed away recently at the age of 84, after he suffered from a massive cardiac arrest.
The author was actively writing articles in several Bengali dailies and had participated in protests against the attack on liberals. He had won several awards during his five-decade long writing career. He was conferred the Sahitya Akademi award for his novel ‘Teesta Parer Brittanto’. His other famous works are ‘Borisaler Jogen Mondal’, ‘Manush Khun Kore Keno’ and ‘Samay Asamayer Brittanto’.

Notes:
The nation-wide electronic agriculture trading portal, e-NAM has recently reached milestone of 1000 mandis (markets) across 18 states and three union territories.
e-NAM was launched in 2016, with the objective of connecting the existing mandis on a common online market platform for agricultural produce in the country. With the recent addition of 38 mandis, it has reached the milestone of 1000 mandis, for which May 15 was fixed as the deadline. Amid the lock-down, trade through e-NAM reduces human intervention in the process.

Notes:
The Prime Minister of Sikkim appealed to the Indian Parliament for making Sikkim a state of India, in the year 1975. A referendum was held in Sikkim and 97.5 per cent of the people voted to abolish the monarchy. Sikkim became the 22nd state of the Indian Union, on 16 May 1975.
The 36th amendment of the Indian constitution made Sikkim as a full state of India and added its name in the to the First Schedule of the Constitution. Every year, the state celebrates May 16 as Sikkim statehood day.