Current Affairs 11-12th Feb., 2015

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1. Insurance regulator IRDA is planning to make it mandatory for policies with an annual premium of Rs. 50,000 for life insurance and Rs. 10,000 for motor and health insurance to be dematerialised. Currently, there are five insurance repositories — NSDL Database Management, Central Insurance Repository, CAMS Repository Services, SHCIL Projects and Karvy Insurance Repository — for a total of around 37 crore policies.

2. Indian Navy conducted a large scale Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) exercise in the Lakshadweep Islands. The HADR exercise was designed to validate Indian Navy’s readiness and capability to handle major cyclones.

3. Reserve Bank will soon issue Rs 10 denomination bank notes in the 'Mahatma Gandhi Series-2005' and incorporate rupee symbol and inset letter 'N' in the numbering panel. All the bank notes in the denomination of Rs 10 issued by the Bank before will continue to be legal tender.

4. ICICI bank has tied up with UAE Exchange to offer an instant bank transfer service 'FLASHremit' that enables customers in the Gulf nation to conveniently send money instantly to their beneficiaries in India in Indian Rupees. ICICI Bank has the largest branch network among private sector banks in the country with over 3800 branches in India.

5. Bankruptcy Law Reform Committee (BLRC) headed by former law secretary TK Vishwanathan has recommended that various sections in the Companies Act 2013 should be amended for a faster liquidation process and to ensure that creditors have a say in determining the viability of a company. The committee said that an ideal insolvency regime needs to strike the right balance between the interests of all the stakeholders by a reasonable allocation of risks among them.

Current Affairs 11th Feb., 2015

1. Economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has won the newly instituted Charleston-EFG John Maynard Keynes Prize. Professor Sen’s ground-breaking work has been academically influential and has had a profound impact on the formation of development policy worldwide.

2. A panel headed by T K Viswanathan was constituted by the finance ministry. It has paved the path for the replacement of the Board of Industrial and Financial Reconstruction (BIFR) and also suggested changes in laws for developing an effective corporate insolvency regime, to improve India’s rank in the ease of doing business index.

3. The petroleum ministry announced that the government has freed regulatory control over storage, transportation and sale of kerosene sold outside of the public distribution system (PDS). The move will reduce demand for diverted PDS kerosene by improving availability of non-PDS kerosene in the open market.

4. In the India's first renewable energy investment summit, RE-Invest 2015, the participating companies have provided non-binding investment indication of 166 gigawatt (Gw) solar power generation capacity and five Gw per year of solar manufacturing capacity.

5. According to credit rating agency ICRA, the new performance criteria for equity infusion into public sector banks (PSBs) could potentially lead to a consolidation in the Indian banking system. The new criteria, announced by the Centre would consider the past performance of every PSB to determine its eligibility for equity infusion.

6. ICICI Bank launched its digital banking product 'e-wallet Pockets' that will allow any individual to transact through a mobile phone with or without a bank account. ‘Pockets’ is like a digital bank where users can fund the e-wallet from any bank account through a debit card or Net banking account and start transacting immediately on a mobile without any documentation.