11 MAY 2021 CURRENT AFFAIRS

• NITI Aayog and Mastercard released a report titled ‘Connected Commerce: Creating a Roadmap for a Digitally Inclusive Bharat’.

• Strengthening the payment infrastructure to promote a level playing field for NBFCs and banks.
• Digitizing registration and compliance processes and diversifying credit sources to enable growth opportunities for MSMEs.
• Building information sharing systems, including a ‘fraud repository’, and ensuring that online digital commerce platforms carry warnings to alert consumers to the risk of frauds.
• Enabling agricultural NBFCs to access low-cost capital and deploy a ‘phygital’ (physical + digital) model for achieving better long-term digital outcomes. Digitizing land records will also provide a major boost to the sector.
• To make city transit seamlessly accessible to all with minimal crowding and queues, leveraging existing smartphones and contactless cards, and aim for an inclusive, interoperable, and fully open system such as that of the London ‘Tube’.

• An unfamiliar lineament is among four factors behind frequent earthquakes in northern Assam’s Sonitpur area.

• A lineament is a linear feature in a landscape dictated by an underlying geological structure such as a fault.
• According to the Geological Survey of India (GSI), Sonitpur district lies within a tectonically complex triangular area bounded by the east-west trending Atherkhet Fault, the northwest-southeast trending Kopili Fault and a north-south trending lineament.
• The two faults and the lineament, along with the oblique convergence of the Indian plate, have caused frequent earthquakes.
• The National Centre of Seismology recorded 29 earthquakes of magnitude varying from 2.6 to 4.7 in Sonitpur after the 6.4 tremblor on April 28 that damaged several buildings, bridges and a river embankment.
• The northeast is demarcated as Seismic Zone V, which indicates a zone with high vulnerability. The Indian plate is moving northeast toward the Eurasian plate in the Himalayan region, their oblique collision and release of stress and strain accumulated in the local tectonic or fault environments lead to earthquakes.

• South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir has dissolved Parliament, opening the way for lawmakers from opposing sides of the country’s civil war to be appointed under a 2018 peace accord.

• The setting up of a new legislative body was part of an accord signed in September 2018 between Mr. Kiir and Vice-President Riek Machar, for years on opposition sides during the five-year civil war that left 3,80,000 people dead and four million displaced.

Important Info :

Do you know?

• South Sudan is a landlocked country in east/central Africa.
• It is bordered to the east by Ethiopia, to the north by Sudan, to the west by the Central African Republic, to the southwest by Democratic Republic of the Congo, to the south by Uganda and to the southeast by Kenya.
• It gained independence from the Republic of the Sudan in 2011, making it the most recent sovereign state or country with widespread recognition as of 2021.
• Its capital is Juba.
• It includes the vast swamp region of the Sudd, formed by the White Nile and known locally as the Bahr al Jabal meaning "Mountain River".
• The White Nile passes through the country, passing by Juba.

• The Reserve Bank said an advisory group had been constituted to assist the second Regulatory Review Authority (RRA) which was set up by the central bank earlier this month to streamline regulations and reduce the compliance burden of regulated entities.

• Headed by SBI Managing Director S. Janakiraman, the group will assist the RRA by identifying regulations, guidelines, and returns that can be rationalised.
• The group will assist the RRA by identifying areas, regulations, guidelines, returns which can be rationalised and submit reports periodically to RRA containing the recommendations/ suggestions.

Important Info :

• In 1999, the RBI had set up a Regulations Review Authority (RRA) for reviewing the regulations, circulars, reporting systems, based on the feedback from the public, banks, and financial institutions.
• The RBI has set up the second Regulatory Review Authority (RRA 2.0), initially for a period of one year from May 01, 2021, with a view to streamline regulations and reduce the compliance burden of regulated entities.
• Reserve Bank of India Deputy Governor M Rajeshwar Rao was appointed as the Regulations Review Authority.

• German intelligence services said they would widen their surveillance of Islamophobic protest movement Pegida in its home state of Saxony, as the group had become “extremist” and “anti-constitutional”.

• While Pegida had previously attracted “heterogeneous” support and taken “moderate” positions, it had developed “an increasingly right-wing extremist orientation”, Saxony’s domestic intelligence agency LfV said.
• Pegida, which campaigns against what it calls the “Islamisation of the West”, was born in October 2014 with xenophobic marches every Monday evening.
• Its protests gained momentum during the refugee crisis of 2015, when Germany became deeply polarised over Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to keep the country’s doors open to asylum seekers.

• An airport built for warplanes in 1939 took commercial wings, heralding the best of times for western Assam’s Dhubri district.

• Rupsi airport near Gauripur, about 15 km from district headquarters Dhubri, was one of South Asia’s largest airports with a 1.8 km runway used by Allied aircraft for supplying arms, manpower and ammunition to forces in Burma and China during World War II.
• Rupsi is Assam's 7th airport and 15th in the northeast including Pakyong in Sikkim. Commercial flights were allowed later.
• India’s Partition in 1947 began eroding the airport’s importance. It was abandoned after the last flight — a Vayudoot from Dhubri to Guwahati — took off in 1983.
• Flybig, an Indore-based company, would be operating the Kolkata-Guwahati-Rupsi flight under the subsidised UDAAN scheme for regional connectivity.
• Rupsi is vital not only for western Assam. It used to and again will cater to the people of western Meghalaya, Cooch Behar and Alipurduar districts of West Bengal and south-western Bhutan, besides fuelling small-scale industries.

• The supreme court said that the Centre alone is empowered to identify Socially and Educationally Backward Classes (SEBC) and include them in the Central List for claiming reservation benefits.

• The President (that is the Central government) alone, to the exclusion of all other authorities, is empowered to identify SEBCs and include them in a list to be published under Article 342A (1), which shall be deemed to include SEBCs in relation to each State and Union Territory for the purposes of the Constitution.
• States could only make suggestions to the President or the statutory commissions concerned for inclusion, exclusion or modification of castes and communities to be included in the List.
• The Central List is to be the “only list” for the SEBC.
• Once published, under Article 342A (1), the list can only be amended through a law enacted by Parliament, by virtue of Article 342A (2).
• In the task of identification of SEBCs, the President shall be guided by the Commission (National Commission for Backward Classes) set up under Article 338B; its advice shall also be sought by the State in regard to policies that might be framed by it.
• If the commission prepares a report concerning matters of identification, such a report has to be shared with the State government, which is bound to deal with it, in accordance with provisions of Article 338B.
• However, the final determination culminates in the exercise undertaken by the President (i.e., the Central Government, under Article 342A (1).
• However, the President’s prerogative as far as the identification and inclusion of SEBCs in the List would not affect the States’ power to make reservations in favour of particular communities or castes within the ambit of Articles 15 and 16.

• Acute shortage of anti-fungal injection ‘amphotericin’ and other anti-fungal medicines used to treat mucormycosis, a life-threatening infection that follows Covid-19 in roughly 30% diabetics, is now adding to difficulties of patients.

• Amphotericin B injection is used to treat serious and potentially life-threatening fungal infections. Amphotericin B injection is in a class of medications called antifungals. It works by slowing the growth of fungi that cause infection.
• It is typically given by injection into a vein.
• Amphotericin B was isolated from Streptomyces nodosus in 1955 and came into medical use in 1958. It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines.

• The World Health Organization approved the Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use — the first Chinese jab to receive the WHO’s green light.

• The UN health agency signed off on the two-dose vaccine, which is already being deployed in dozens of countries around the world.
• The WHO has already given emergency use listing to the vaccines being made by Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, J&J, and the AstraZeneca jab being produced at sites in India and in South Korea.

Important Info :

How does this vaccine work?

• The Sinopharm vaccine is an inactivated coronavirus vaccine, like Covaxin developed by Bharat Biotech India (BBIL) in collaboration with the National Institute of Virology (NIV).
• Inactivated vaccines take the disease-carrying virus (in this case SARS-CoV-2) and kill it using heat, chemicals or radiation. WHO notes that these vaccines take longer to make and might need two or three doses to be administered. The flu and polio vaccines use this approach as well.
• Out of the major vaccines being used in the world, Sinopharm, Covaxin and Sinovac (also developed by China) are the only ones that use inactivated virus. Others such as Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna are mRNA vaccines, whereas Oxford-AstraZeneca, Sputnik and Johnson and Johnson’s single-dose vaccines use a viral vector.