Current Affairs 27-28th Mar, 2015

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Current Affairs 28th Mar, 2015

1. Reserve Bank of India has proposed to tighten the norms for large exposure by capping a bank's exposure to 25 per cent of its tier-I capital, both for single borrower and also for the group. At present, banks can lend up to 15 per cent of their net worth to a single borrower.

2. Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in consultation with the government has fixed the limits for ways and means advances (WMA) for the first half of financial year 2015-16 (April-September 2015) at Rs 45,000 crore.

3. President Pranab Mukherjee conferred Bharat Ratna, the country’s highest civilian award on veteran Parliamentarian and former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, founder member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). He has been credited with taking bold initiatives like the historic bus journey to Lahore, Pakistan in 1999 to push for peace and security.

4. The new Foreign Trade Policy (FTP) will be unveiled for 2015-2020 on April 1. The new FTP will not only focus on offering incentives to the sectors that getting clobbered due to external conditions, it will also offer sops to those sectors that are having a robust performance despite weak global factors.

5. Centre has recommended to the President that the Rajya Sabha be prorogued to pave the way for re-promulgating the land ordinance, which lapses on April 5. Prorogation refers to an action when a session of a legislative body is discontinued with dissolving it.

Current Affairs 27th Mar, 2015

1. Cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave its approval to enact a legislation to declare 101 inland waterways as national waterways for navigation. This is to create a logistic supply chain with intermodal (rail, road and waterways) connectivity.

2. Government approved a mechanism for importing gas for power generation and supply of such power through a subsidy grant. The mechanism involves reverse bidding process through which power plants will quote a rate, the subsidy for which will be released through the Power System Development Fund.

3. A report by Standard & Poor’s (S&P), ‘India credit spotlight’, suggests that Indian companies, especially those in sectors like utilities & infra, metals & mining, oil & gas and telecom, continue to have high debt on their books. The report also points out that the level of debt of top Indian companies remains lower than comparable ones in China and the Asian region.

4. National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog would not estimate either poverty lines or the number of the poor in the country. A task force under Aayog Vice-Chairman Arvind Panagariya on poverty alleviation is to not define or compute poverty as an aggregate measure but will look at social indicators to assess the impact of social schemes on the poor.

5. Government has prepared a list of public sector units (PSUs) which will be sold to private investors. Jaitley has budgeted Rs 28,500 crore from strategic sales, and Rs 41,000 crore from miniroity stake sales for 2015-16.