Current Affairs 25-26th Mar, 2015

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1. Sun Pharmaceutical Industries, India’s largest drugmaker announced the closure of its merger with Ranbaxy Laboratories which would deliver synergies worth $250 million (about Rs 1,500 crore) in three years.

2. Kerala Finance Minister K M Mani will head the Empowered Committee of State Finance Ministers for the Centre to roll out Goods and Services Tax (GST) from the targeted date of April 1, 2016. The Committee had held a meeting under the chairmanship of Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitely earlier.

3. Government approved the approach and key components of e-Kranti: National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) 2.0, which aims to enhance the portfolio of citizen-centric services and ensure optimum usage of core information and communication technology (ICT). E-Kranti is an important pillar of the Digital India programme.

4. India and Qatar vowed to take bilateral economic ties to the next level, with Qatar promising to invest heavily in this country’s infrastructure and technology sectors. The decision was taken during the meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad Al-Thani.

5. Spectrum auction came to an end after 19 days adding Rs 1,09,874 crore to the government exchequer. This is a 33 per cent increase over the reserve price. The government had put a total of 470.75 MHz of spectrum for auction in the 800-MHz, 900-MHz and 1800-MHz bands, and 2100-MHz band across 17 circles.

Current Affairs 25th Mar, 2015

1. Supreme Court has struck down the controversial Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, which dealt with posts and comments on online platforms. The Court held the Section to be unconstitutional and a violation of the guarantee of free speech under Article 19 (1) (a) of the Constitution.

2. The Indian economy will grow by 7.8 per cent in 2015-16 on improved performance in industry and services, says new Asian Development Bank (ADB) report - Asian Development Outlook 2015 (ADO). According to the report, India is expected to grow faster than China in the next few years.

3. The patent office has refused to entertain Facebook’s application for patent to the “method and apparatus for an application crawler”. Facebook Crawler fetches content, including text and video, from various websites and generates a preview for browsers.

4. President Barack Obama has said that the US will make it easier for foreign companies to bring corporate executives into the country through the L1B work visa category that could benefit the $146-billion Indian IT industry. The L-1B visa is a non-immigration visa issued for intra-company employee transfers and valid for five years.

5. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo met Narendra Modi and launched ‘Twitter Samvad’ as part of Prime Minister’s Digital India initiative. ‘Twitter Samvad’ is a tweet powered service that will deliver a set of curated tweets to mobile users as SMSes, giving updates on government services, policies and activities with information sourced from 16 twitter accounts of government departments and its leaders.