GUJARAT
- At 52MT, gold imports plunge to an 8-year low
- The gold imports in Gujarat have plunged to an eight-year low in the financial year 2018-19 that ended on March 31. According to data by Ahmedabad Air Cargo Complex, the imports of the yellow metal stood at 51.98 metric tonne (MT) in Gujarat in FY 2018-19. This means, gold imports declined by 30% against 74.2MT gold imported in the state in FY 2017-18.
- Analysts indicate that the dip in gold imports can be attributed to the price of gold that remained on the higher side throughout the year.
INTERNATIONAL
- India, Australia to hold a joint exercise on maritime security from 2 April
- India and Australia are set to further deepen defence and strategic relationship with the third edition of the biennial, bilateral exercise AUSINDEX 19 from April 2 to April 16 at Vishakhapatnam.
- The upcoming exercise will focus on anti-submarine warfare and will see Australia’s largest defence force deployment in India.
- This exercise is part of the strong and growing Australia-India strategic partnership.
- More than 1,000 Australian defence force personnel comprising Navy, Army and Air force assets will work together with their Indian counterparts in military training activities
AUSINDEX 2019
- From the Australian side,
HMAS Canberra (landing helicopter dock), Auxiliary Oiler Replenishment vessel,
two frigates, HMAS Newcastle and HMAS Parramatta and P81 and P8 maritime patrol
aircraft, will be involved in the exercise. A Kilo-class
submarine, land-based Hawk aircraft that will provide the air attack element
for the exercise, a Kamorta class anti-submarine vessel, besides
a stealth destroyer will lead the Indian deployment for the exercise.
- The exercise will feature the
deployment of Australian personnel on Indian ships and vice versa. The area of
the exercise will be within 200 miles of Vishakhapatnam.
NATIONAL
- MPI 2018 report says Indias povert rate has reduced drastically
- According
to the Multi-dimensional
Poverty Index 2018 report, the four poorest states namely Bihar,
Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, and Madhya Pradesh were still
home to 196
million MPI poor people, which was over half of all the MPI
poor people in India.
- The
Multi-dimensional Poverty Index 2018 report prepared by the United
Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human
Development Initiative makes the following observations
about India: India has reduced its poverty rate drastically from 55% to
28% in 10 years, with 271 million people moving out of
poverty between 2005-06 and 2015-16.
- Jharkhand had shown the greatest improvement, followed by Arunachal Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, and Nagaland. Kerala, one of the least poor regions in 2006, reduced its MPI by around 92%.
- At 15,256ft, Himachal’s Tashigang is world’s highest polling station
- The Tashigang polling
station in Himachal Pradesh falls in Buddhist-dominated
Lahaul-Spiti, one of the 17 assembly segments that form the Mandi Lok
Sabha seat, the second largest constituency in India.
- Situated
at about 29 km from the India-China border, the polling station covers two
villages— Tashigang and Gete.
- As
per the revised electoral rolls, the two villages have 48 voters, of which 30
are men and 18 women.
- Earlier the tiny settlement of Hikkim in the same district located at an altitude of about 14,400 feet was the highest polling station in the country.
- Demat share transfer to be effective from 1st April
- Securities and
Exchange Board of India (SEBI) said that the transfer of shares of listed companies can be
done only in dematerialised form from April 1 but
investors are not barred from holding shares in the
physical form. In December 2018, the capital markets watchdog extended the
deadline for transfer of shares of listed companies only indematerialised (demat)
form to April 1. Now, it has been decided not to extend
the deadline.
- The decision that the transfer of shares has to be compulsorily in demat form was taken way back in March 2018. SEBI also said that the measure would come into effect from April 1, 2019.
- Nobel Prize recipient Amartya Sen awarded with Oxford University’s Bodley award
- The 85-year-old winner of the Nobel Memorial
Prize in Economic Sciences, was awarded with the
prestigious Bodley Medal, the highest honour granted by the
University of Oxford’s world-famous Bodleian Libraries, for his contribution in
literature, culture, science and communication.
- This year’s other winner of the Bodley Medal is
Nobel Prize-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro.
- Past winners of the honour include physicist Stephen Hawking, novelist Hilary Mantel and inventor of the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee.
- The Nobel Prize of computing – “Turing Award”, won by 3 Pioneers in Artificial Intelligence
- The 2018 Turing Award,
known as the “Nobel Prize of computing,” has been given to Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey
Hinton, and Yann LeCun — sometimes called the ‘godfathers
of AI’, for their work developing the AI subfield of deep learning.
- The trio believed in the potential of AI and brought to the world the innovations such as neural networks, self-driving cars, facial recognition, CNN and much more.
Gk bit – Turing
Award
- Initiated in 1966, this annual
award is named after British mathematician Alan M. Turing,
whose work laid the foundation for computer science and artificial intelligence.
- It honors the individual for contributing major
technical importance in the computer field.
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