IASTODAY DAILY CAPSULES -General Studies-02

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India to manufacture spare parts, components for Russian defence equipment

News

• In a major breakthrough in Indo-Russian defence ties, India will start manufacturing spare parts and components for the Russian military equipment under transfer of technology and set up joint ventures, as the two strategic partners tried to transform their existing buyer-seller relationship into one of collaboration.

Aim:  to ensuring the maintenance of the Russian-made armaments and military equipment under the Make in India programme by transferring technologies and setting up joint ventures.

India-Russia partnership

• This was agreed during wide-ranging talks between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Far East Russian port city as they pledged to elevate the India-Russia partnership to new heights of cooperation.
• Close cooperation between Russia and India in military and military-technical areas is a key pillar of bilateral and especially privileged strategic partnership.
• The two sides agreed to foster cooperation with the goal of keeping joint production in India of spare parts, components and other products on track.
• India and Russia signed on a road map for cooperation in the hydrocarbons sector with Moscow agreeing to look at supplying coking coal from its Far East.

New Delhi slips 6 notches in world’s most liveable cities ranking owing to climate change

News

• The national capital has dropped by six places to rank 118th on a list of the world’s most liveable cities due to increase in cases of petty crimes and poor air quality, an annual survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) showed.

World’s most liveable cities

• New Delhi registered the biggest decline in Asia, Mumbai also fell two places since last year to rank 119th on the list topped by Vienna (Austria) for the second consecutive year.
• The EIU also flagged “an escalation in abuses against journalists in recent years” in India, citing a decline in the country’s ranking in Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index where India now sits in the bottom quartile of countries.
• Asian cities overall have scored slightly below the global average while three Asian cities Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea (135th), Pakistan’s Karachi (136th) and Bangladesh’s Dhaka (138th) are among the ten least liveable globally.
• New Delhi has fallen in the index because of downgrades to its culture and environment score as well as fall in the stability score owing to rising crime rates.
• The EIU said its ranking of 140 cities is based on their scores in five broad categories stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education, and infrastructure. Each factor in a city is rated as acceptable, tolerable, uncomfortable, undesirable or intolerable.
• While New Delhi has been given an overall score of 56.3, Mumbai has got 56.2, while top-ranked Vienna has scored 99.1 and least-ranked Damascus (Syria) has got 30.7 points.
• A score between 50-60 points, which is the case for India, indicates constrained liveability conditions.
• The 2018 update to the World Health Organisation (WHO) Global Ambient Air Quality Database shows that New Delhi has the sixth highest annual mean concentration of fine particulate matter among cities around the world.

Government to pull out all the stops to cut use of plastics

News

• The Union government is working on a multi-ministerial plan to discourage the use of single use plastics across the country, likely to kick off on October 2, Gandhi Jayanti.

Single use plastics

• The nodal Ministry for the scheme would be the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change, which has been asked not just to ensure and enforce the ban on single use plastics but also finalise the pending policy for Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), especially on milk packets.
• The Department of Industrial Promotion is to ensure that all cement factories use plastic as fuel, while the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) has been asked to ensure that not only is plastic waste collected and transported responsibly along National Highways but also all collected plastic waste is used for road construction.
• Roads constructed using water plastic are durable against extreme weather conditions and are also cost-effective.
• The Railways Ministry will organise massive shramdaans (voluntary work) on October 2 for collection of plastic waste at railway stations and along rail tracks and will run advertising radio spots on all trains.
• Since 70% of the total plastic waste in India is from urban areas, all 4,378 urban local bodies have been tasked with massive shramdaanfor plastic collection and to collect and segregate waste into recyclable and non-recyclable categories.
• Gram panchayats have been asked to mobilise shramdaan on October 2 to ensure that all roads under the Prime Minister Gram Sadak Yojana are built using plastic waste and segregate waste in rural areas.
• Ministries of Tourism and Textiles have also been roped in for the campaign, including pushing for greater production of jute bags etc. to replace plastic bags.
• The Tourism Ministry has been asked to ensure awareness on SUPs at iconic tourist spots.

India extends $1 billion line of credit for development of Russia’s Far East

News

• Prime Minister Narendra Modi said India will walk shoulder-to-shoulder with Russia in its development of the Far East and announced a $1 billion line of credit for the development of the resource-rich region.

Act Far East policy

• The Prime Minister, in the presence of Russian President Vladimir Putin, also unveiled the “Act Far East” policy to boost India’s engagement with Russia’s Far East region.
• Prime Minister arrived in Russia on a two-day visit, is the first Indian prime minister to visit to the Russian Far East Region,to participate in the 20th India-Russia annual summit with President Putin and the fifth meeting of the Eastern Economic Forum (EEF).
• The forum focuses on development of business and investment opportunities in the Russian Far East Region, and presents enormous potential for developing close and mutually beneficial cooperation between India and Russia in the region.

 

IASTODAY DAILY CAPSULES -General Studies-03

External benchmark-based lending must: RBI

News

• The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) made it mandatory for all banks to link floating rate loans to retail customers and loans to micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) to an external benchmark.
• Some banks have already started to link home and auto loan rates to the repo rate, which is an external benchmark.

Aim:  To faster transmission of monetary policy rates. Banks have been reluctant to cut interest rates despite the RBI lowering the repo rate by 110 basis points (bps) between February and August.

Benchmark linking

• The norms for external benchmark linking of interest rates was scheduled to be operational from April 1, but was deferred.
• At present, interest rates on loans are linked to a bank’s marginal cost of fund-based interest rate (MCLR). Banks can choose from one of the four external benchmarks repo rate, three-month treasury bill yield, six-month treasury bill yield or any other benchmark interest rate published by Financial Benchmarks India Private Ltd.

India among top 10 nations in gold reserves

 

News

• India has pipped the Netherlands to move into the list of top ten countries in terms of total gold reserves.

Gold reserves

• According to the World Gold Council, India has gold reserves totalling 618.2 tonnes, which is marginally higher than the Netherlands’ reserves of 612.5 tonnes.
• In terms of individual countries, India actually ranks ninth since the International Monetary Fund (IMF) occupies the third position after the U.S. and Germany.
• S. leads the country list with total gold reserves of 8,133.5 tonnes followed by Germany with 3,366.8 tonnes.
• While the IMF is ranked third with a holding of 2,451.8 tonnes, it is followed by countries such as Italy (2,451.8 tonnes), France (2,436.1 tonnes), Russia (2,219.2 tonnes), China (1,936.5 tonnes), Switzerland (1,040 tonnes) and Japan (765.2 tonnes) before India at the 10th spot.
• India’s entry into the list of top ten countries comes at a time when the quantum of monthly purchases is the lowest in over three years.
• Previously, when the WGC reported the country-wise reserves, India’s gold holding was pegged at 607 tonnes.
• India’s gold reserves have grown substantially in the past couple of decades from 357.8 tonnes in the first quarter of 2000 to the current 618.2 tonnes.
• India’s neighbour Pakistan has seen its standing unchanged at the 45th position with total gold reserves of 64.6 tonnes.

 

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