Daily Current Affairs MCQ - April 23, 2021 - UPSC MCQ

• The Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) is a regional organization.

  • It comprises seven countries. Five of these seven countries- India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Bangladesh- are from South Asia while the remaining two, Thailand and Myanmar, are from Southeast Asia. 

• The group remained dormant for many years till it was revived a few years ago as an alternative to the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), which despite having the potential, has not been able to move forward due to friction between India and Pakistan.

• Currently, the BIMSTEC is involved in 15 sectors, including trade, technology, agriculture, tourism, fisheries, energy and climate change, and sectoral cooperation.

• The Permanent Secretariat of BIMSTEC was established in Dhaka, Bangladesh on 13th September, 2014 after a span of 17 years of the founding of BIMSTEC. 

• The Emergency Credit Line Guarantee Scheme (ECLGS) provides fully guaranteed and collateral free additional credit to MSMEs, business enterprises, MUDRA borrowers and individual loans for business purposes. 

• National Credit Guarantee Trustee Company (NCGTC) is the guarantee provider under the ECLGS scheme. 

  • NCGTC is a private limited company incorporated under the Companies Act, 1956 in 2014, established by the Department of Financial Services, Ministry of Finance, as a wholly owned company of the Government of India, to act as a common trustee company for multiple credit guarantee funds.

• Recently, the government has extended the ECLGS until 30th June 2021, and also widened its scope to new sectors; covers business enterprises in Hospitality, Travel & Tourism, Leisure & Sporting sectors:

  • Which had, as on 29th february 2020,

  • Whose total credit outstanding is not exceeding Rs. 500 crore and overdues, if any, were for 60 days or less. 

• The current account records exports and imports in goods and services and transfer payments. 

  • It represents a country's transactions with the rest of the world and, like the capital account, is a component of a country's Balance of Payments (BOP).

• There is a deficit in Current Account if the value of the goods and services imported exceeds those exported.

• Current Account Deficit could be reduced by boosting exports and curbing non-essential imports such as gold, mobiles, and electronics. 

A Rs 4,000 crore was allocated for over a five year period in the FY22 Budget for India's Deep Ocean Mission.

Deep Ocean Mission framework entails the inclusion of following broad components.

• The first outlines the development of underwater vehicles and robotics technologies to assist deep-sea mining.

• The second involves ocean climate advisories that envisage to determine the extent ocean-atmosphere coupling influences the sub-continent climate.

The third component includes research on deep-sea biodiversity, an area of work that has made little headway.

• Some of the major resources ocean floors offer are polymetallic nodules, cobalt-rich manganese crust, hydrothermal deposits and gas hydrates. Of these, only gas hydrates are found in India's exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in mineable quantities in the order of ~950 trillion cubic m.

• The Indian National Centre manages oceanic data for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS) through its Digital Ocean and allied frameworks.

• The Information Technology Act, 2000 is an Act of the Indian Parliament notified on 17 October 2000. It is the primary law in India dealing with cybercrime and electronic commerce.

• Information Technology Act deals with hate content on the Internet.

• The Union home ministry, in its report submitted to the Parliamentary panel on Home Affairs, has said that even as there is no "legislative definition for cybercrime", any offence committed "against a computer resource or with the aid of a computer resource is called a cybercrime". "Such offences are dealt as per the legal provisions of the Information Technology Act, Indian Penal Code, POSCO etc,"

The Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) is the first Political party in the country that has declared the entity that made donations to it through electoral bonds, the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), a poll rights group, said.

• A declaration of a ₹1 crore donation was made in the party's 2019-20 contribution report, it added.

• According to the contribution report of the ruling party in Jharkhand, the donation was made by aluminium and copper manufacturing company Hindalco.

• In a new report, the ADR said the most common source of income for national and regional political parties in 2019-20 were donations through electoral bonds.

• Electoral bonds have been pitched as an alternative to cash donations made to political parties as part of efforts to bring transparency in political funding.

• Given the anonymity provided to donors by the scheme, electoral bonds have emerged as the most popular channel of donations to parties in the last two years

These bonds are redeemable in the designated account of a registered political party. The bonds are available for purchase by any person (who is a citizen of India or incorporated or established in India) for a period of ten days each in the months of January, April, July and October as may be specified by the Central Government. A person being an individual can buy bonds, either singly or jointly with other individuals. Donor's name is not mentioned on the bond.

While speaking at the annual Boao Forum, China's President Xi Jinping said that global rules cannot be imposed "by one or a few countries".

• Headquartered in China, the Boao Forum for Asia (BFA) is an international organization jointly initiated by 29 member states.

• BFA holds its annual conference in Boao, Hainan regularly.

• The founding purpose of BFA was to promote economic integration in Asia. Its mission now is to pool positive energy for Asia and the world.

• The first conference of BFA was held on Feb. 26-27, 2001 in Boao, Hainan Province, China.

• The forum, sometimes known as the "Asian Davos" is modelled on the World Economic Forum held annually in Davos, Switzerland.

• Its fixed address is in Bo'ao, Hainan province, China, although the Secretariat is based in Beijing.

According to a study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science by palaeontologists from the Netherlands, the Tyrannosaurus had a preferred walking speed of just 5 kmph– about the same as the average walking speed of humans.

• The Tyrannosaurus rex, the most storied of all dinosaurs, is considered the most fearsome eating machine to have evolved on Earth. It lived toward the end of the Cretaceous period, around 66 million to 68 million years ago.

• It is believed that an adult member of the species stood 12 feet tall and 40 feet long, and weighed between 5,000 to 7,000 kg.

• The dinosaur inhabited what is today's western United States. It was not found in India; the fiercest of all Indian dinosaurs was probably the Rajasaurus narmadensis, followed by another specimen of the Abelisauridae family, the Indosuchus raptorius.

• Previous studies placed the T. rex's walking speed between 7.2-10.8 kmph– the maximum speed that its bone structure researchers believed could have permitted. The new research reduces the previous estimates by more than half.

• Another study, which came out in Science last week, posits that some 2.5 billion T. rex lived and died on Earth throughout two or three millennia.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), an independent bi-partisan commission, has recommended for the second year in a row that the State Department put India on a list ('Countries of Particular Concern' or CPCs) for the worst violations of religious freedoms in 2020.

• One of the 10 USCIRF commissioners presented a dissenting view.

• The USCISRF recommended that the administration impose targeted sanctions on Indian individuals and entities for "severe violations of religious freedom".

• A second recommendation was for the administration to promote inter-faith dialogue and the rights of all communities at bilateral and multilateral forums "such as the ministerial of the Quadrilateral [the Quad]".

• Another recommendation — to the U.S. Congress — was to raise issues in the U.S.-India bilateral space, such as by hosting hearings, writing letters and constituting Congressional delegations.

• The USCIRF recommendations are non-binding and the Trump administration had rejected the USCIRF recommendation to designate India a CPC last year, when it released its own determinations in December.

• The key concerns of the 2021 report include the Citizenship (Amendment) Act.