Current Affairs Questions & Answers - May 24, 2017

ANSWER: Saurabh Agrawal

Explanation:
Tata Group Chairman N Chandrasekaran announced a key recruitment at holding company Tata Sons on 22^nd May 2017, of veteran investment banker Saurabh Agrawal as group chief financial officer.

Agrawal, who will join from July, is currently the head of strategy with the Aditya Birla Group.

As group CFO at Tata Sons, he will have to focus on bringing back some of the loss-making businesses on track. Agrawal was instrumental in handling the Idea-Vodafone merger deal, as well as the Grasim-Aditya Birla Nuvo merger for the Birla entity.

It will be the second big appointment by Chandrasekaran, after that of Ankur Verma, former managing director of investment banking at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, who joined Tata Group in March.

Prior to the Birla job, Saurabh Agrawal was heading corporate finance at Standard Chartered Bank in India and South Asia.

He had also been the head of investment banking at DSP Merrill Lynch, where he worked with Chandrasekaran on Tata Consultancy Services’ initial public offer of equity in 2004, beside later acquisitions.

Agrawal brings deep capital markets knowledge and valuable cross-industry experience to this critical leadership role in the Tata Group.

Saurabh Agrawal is a graduate of IIT Roorkee, with a post-graduate management degree from IIM Calcutta.

One of the stated complaints of Tata Group patriarch Ratan Tata against former Tata Sons chairman Cyrus Mistry was that the latter had not appointed a group CFO after Ishaat Hussain retired as Tata Sons’ finance director in 2012.

The group CFO position is important and considered a second link between Tata Sons and its subsidiaries, after the chairman.
The group CFO will also have to decide on job cuts ensure that Tata Sons gives enough dividends to Tata Trusts, which own 66 per cent stake in the company.

ANSWER: Life Insurance Corporation

Explanation:
Karnataka Bank has entered into an MoU with LIC for selling life insurance products.

The bank signed the corporate agency agreement with LIC in Mangaluru on 22 May.

The bank will be able to provide vast choice of life insurance products to its customers across all its 769 branches with this MoU.

LIC and Karnataka Bank are two great household names and both are time tested entities.

This tie-up will provide an opportunity to provide more effective life insurance solutions to the customers.

LIC will strive hard to create customized insurance solutions for the customers of Karnataka Bank, and is committed for reaching a new benchmark in claim settlement process, he said.

ANSWER: Both of the above

Explanation:
Cochin Port Trust has received two Best Performance Awards from Ministry of Shipping for the highest growth in operating surplus and also for achieving third highest growth in cargo traffic among the major ports in the year 2016-17.

Cochin Port Trust has registered an operating profit of INR 127.72 crore during 2016-17 as against INR 70.89 crore during 2015-16 recording a growth of 80 per cent.

Operating profit during 2014-15 was INR 19.55 crore.

The Port handled 25.01 MMT cargo during 2016-17 with a growth of 13.2 per cent over 22.10 MMT handled in 2015-16.

The containers handled during 2016-17 is 4.91 lakh TEUs with a growth of 17.0 per cent over 4.20 lakh TEUs in 2015-16.

ANSWER: quasars

Explanation:
Astronomers using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) have created the first map of the large-scale structure of the universe based entirely on the positions of quasars.

Quasars are incredibly bright and distant points of light.

The quasars are so bright that they can be seen all the way across the universe and that is what makes them the ideal objects to use to make the biggest map yet.

The extra brightness of the quasars is due to the super- massive black holes found at their centres.

As matter and energy fall into a quasars’ black hole, they heat up to incredibly high temperatures and begin to glow.

Scientists used the Sloan Foundation Telescope to observe the innumerable quasars in order to make the map.

During the first two years of the survey, astronomers measured accurate three-dimensional positions of more than 147,000 quasars.

The telescope observations gave the team the distances of the quasars, which were used to create a three-dimensional map of where the quasars are located.

Sloan Digital Sky Survey: Know More

• The survey known as Sloan Digital Sky Survey was extended to Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS) to better understand the expansion history of the universe.
• The process involved studying baryon acoustic oscillations, which are the present-day imprint of sound waves that travelled through the early universe, when it was much hotter and denser than today.
• However, due to a sudden change in conditions when the universe was 380,000 years old, the sound waves became “frozen” in place.
• These frozen waves are left imprinted in the three- dimensional structure of the present-day universe. The study confirms the standard model of cosmology that researchers have built over the last 20 years. In this standard model, the universe follows the predictions of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, but includes components that cannot be measured or causes not understood.

ANSWER: Vaishnavi

Explanation:
Thirteen-year-old Vaishnavi of India beat hundreds of competitors to win the first Asia Level Yoga Competition.

The competition, featuring teams from five nations, was held in Thailand on May 13 and 14.

June 21 is International Day of Yoga. The U.N. designated the day on the urging of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

More than 150 students from countries like India, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand participated in first ‘Pacific-Asia Level Yoga Competition’ held in Bangkok, Thailand on May 13 and 14.

From India, 15 students performed in the junior category (13-15 years).

In that competition Vaishnavi secured first place and the overall championship. She has staged more than 1,000 performances and has totally received more than 200 gold medals.

She has won more than 60 gold medals in district-level yoga competitions and overall championship in the national-level competitions held in Cochin, Gujarat and Bengaluru.

She has secured the overall championship in national-level yoga competition held in Andaman, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand.

ANSWER: Reliance Jio

Explanation:
Reliance Jio has received TM Forum’s ‘Digital Service Innovator of the Year Award’ 2017.

TM Forum is the industry association driving digital business transformation of the communications industry.

Reliance Jio got this award by acquiring 90 million customers in four months.

Digital Service Innovator of the Year Award is given to the company or organisation which has made the most significant and innovative contribution to advancing the digital revolution in society.

In the category of Smart Business Provider, Verizon and Ericsson together won the Business Transformation of the Year Award.

Verizon: Know More

• Verizon Enterprise Solutions worked with Ericsson to provide a virtual services environment enabling the rapid launch of the new offerings targeted at enterprises across the globe.
• The solution from Ericsson provides end-to-end service orchestration, closed-loop service assurance and virtual network function (VNF) onboarding and testing and supports self-service for Verizon’s customers.
• It uses Ericsson Dynamic Orchestration, leveraging abstraction, model-driven configuration and automation techniques to contain underlying complexity.
• The Ericsson VNF Factory enables efficient onboarding and validation of NFV’s into Verizon’s ecosystem - all reducing time to market for new Verizon enterprise services.

ANSWER: Nauru

Explanation:
The tiny island of Nauru which is the world’s smallest republic has become the sixth country to ratify the International Solar Alliance (ISA) Framework pact.

Another five more nations namely the Comoros, Cote d’Ivoire, Somalia, Ghana and Djibouti have committed to ink the International Solar Alliance Framework Pact in the ongoing annual meeting of the African Development bank in Gandhinagar.

This is the first time that India is hosting the annual meetings of the AfDB and its sister institutions. India had joined the African Development Bank (AfDB) in 1983.

Nauru is a tiny island republic in Micronesia located in the northeast of Australia. Nauru has a population of 10,200-odd individuals.

The highest point in the island measures only 65 metres above sea level.

Hence, the island remains vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change.

Nauru has a hot and humid climate and normally don’t experience cyclones.

Around 30% of the country’s power needs are met through solar power installations.

The tiny republic has set a target for attaining 50% of energy production from renewable sources by 2020.

ISA: Know More

• On the first day of the COP-21 summit, the International Solar Alliance was launched by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and French President Francois Hollande.
• It is a union of countries with abundant sunlight.
• Under this alliance, 121 countries that fall within the tropics {i.e. between Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn} have been invited to make collaborative efforts to harness solar energy to generate the electricity.
• Most of these countries are from Asia, Africa and South America.
• There are three objectives behind the International Solar Alliance.
• First is to force down prices by driving demand; second is to bring standardization in solar technologies and third is to foster research and development.

ANSWER: MP

Explanation:
IIT Kharagpur’s Rekhi Centre of Excellence for the Science of Happiness and Madhya Pradesh government’s ‘Rajya Anandam Sansthan’ (Department of Happiness) has signed an MoU.

They will collaborate on the development of a Happiness Index for measuring the well-being of the residents of the state.

The Happiness index would be developed by IIT-KGP and the data collected by the state government would be analysed to assess the happiness levels of people of the state and to suggest recommendations to enhance happiness levels in the state.

IIT-Kharagpur will also develop an online screening and assessment system to suitably identify the volunteers from more than 30,000 people who have expressed their desire to be part of the collaborative effort.

Additionally, IIT-KGP will also develop online courses on happiness with the help of evaluation system available at its Center for Educational Technology.

India has been ranked at 122 out of 155 countries in the 2017 United Nations’s World Happiness Index (WHI).

Among the 8 SAARC nations, Pakistan is at 80th position, Nepal stood at 99, Bhutan at 97, Bangladesh at 110 and Sri Lanka is at 120.

The list is topped by Norway, followed by Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland and Finland.

The rankings are based factors such as inequality, life expectancy, GDP per capita, public trust (i.e. a lack of corruption in government and business), and social support.

Together they are used to generate a happiness score of country on a scale from 1 to 10.This year is the fifth such report since the first was published in 2012.

IIT-KGP, which is recognized as an Institute of National Importance was established in 1951 by the Government of India. It was the first IIT to be established in the country.