CURRENT AFFAIRS 13th JULY, 2014

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1. Finance ministry is examining issues relating to merger of PSU banks and decision on it will be taken before the end of the year. SBI first merged its State Bank of Saurashtra with itself in 2008. Two years later in 2010, State Bank of Indore was merged with SBI. At present, the country’s largest lender has five associate banks.

2. INS kamorta is the first anti submarine corvettes which is indigenously built by Kolkata based Garden Reach Shipbuilders and Engineers ltd, was handed over to Indian Navy. It is built with indigenously developed special grade highly tensile steel and has bulk of sensors and weapon systems in its hulk. In addition, Kolkata(D63), domestically built guided missile destroyer was also delivered to Indian Navy.

3. R.V Sindhu Sahana, the first indigenously built multi disciplinary research vessel was launched by Union Minister of State of Science and Technology and Earth Sciences, Jitendra Singh. It serves as platform to launch oceanographic research programmes of global importance with state of art equipments and laboratories in it for online data collection and data processing.

4. Government is set to launch Infrastructure Investment Trusts(InvITs) by August this year to address paucity of funds for the infrastructure sector. Market regulator Sebi will notify these trusts in about three weeks along with the real estate investment trusts (REITs). InvITs will be on lines of REITs and will help project developers to raise long term fund for new projects.

5. The finance ministry is proposing a special fund of Rs 50,000 crore to address funding challenges of power sector projects and is also working on setting up two asset reconstruction companies for the power and roads sector. The ARCs will take over the pending projects so that loans from the banking sector do not turn into non-performing assets.