DAILY CURRENT AFFAIRS

By admin: March 9, 2022

Reserve Bank of India launches UPI123Pay

Tags: Economy/Finance Popular

To make digital payment more accessible to the people, the Reserve Bank of India has launched UPI123Pay for people who do not have a smartphone .

• UPI 123 Pay has been designed to make Unified Payment Interface (UPI) digital payment system  more  user friendly  through feature phones . 

• Feature phones are normal phones which do not have internet connection and in India around 40 crore people use feature phones .

• UPI123Pay includes four distinct options :

App-based Functionality:

An app would be installed on the feature phone through which several UPI functions, available on smartphones, will also be available on feature phones.

Missed Call: 

This will allow feature phone users to access their bank account and perform routine transactions such as receiving, transferring funds, regular purchases, bill payments, etc., by giving a missed call on the number displayed at the merchant outlet. The customer will receive an incoming call to authenticate the transaction by entering UPI PIN (Personal Identification Number).

Interactive Voice Response (IVR): 

UPI payment through pre-defined IVR numbers would require users to initiate a secured call from their feature phones to a predetermined number and complete UPI on-boarding formalities to be able to start making financial transactions without internet connection.

Proximity Sound-based Payments: 

This uses sound waves to enable contactless, offline, and proximity data communication on any device.

• This is not the first time that UPI facilities are being made available through a feature phone . UPI facility can be used through a Unstructured Supplementary Service Data(USSD) service. 

• Under this service the user has to dial *99# to receive a set of  menus before initiating instructions. It was complicated and difficult to use and the new UPI123Pay is more easy to use .

UPI (Unified Payment Interface)

• UPI was launched by NPCI(National Payment Corporation of India ) in 2016 . It provides an instant fund transfer system from one bank account to another through a mobile phone .

• It is operational 24x7 and 365 days.

• The maximum fund transfer limit is Rs 2 lakh per transaction.

Important for Exam 

UPI :Unified Payment Interface 

USSD: Unstructured Supplementary Service Data

Governor of RBI: Shaktikanta Das 

Headquarter of RBI: Mumbai.

RBI launches 24x7 helpline DigiSaathi

Tags: Economy/Finance Popular

Reserve Bank of India has launched a 24x7 helpline , ‘DigiSaathi’  to address the queries of digital payment users across products.

• DigiSaathi will assist users with their queries on digital payments via website & chatbot facility and through toll-free calls where users can dial or call out the options / products for which the information is required.

• Automated responses on information related to digital payment products and services are available in Hindi and English through multiple options like – (a) toll-free number (1800-891-3333), (b) a short code (14431), (c) website  www.digisaathi.info, and chatbots.

Governor of RBI: Shaktikanta Das 

Headquarter of RBI: Mumbai.

SEBI raises investment limit through UPI to Rs 5 lakhs in debt securities

Tags: Economy/Finance Popular

Securities Exchange Board of India has increased the investment limit  for payment through Unified Payment Interface (UPI) for retail investors buying debt securities in the public issue of a company to Rs 5 lakh. 

• At present the limit is Rs 2 lakhs.

• The new rule will come into effect from 1 May 2022.

Concept Clearing 

Debt Securities.

Company needs funds for its business. It can raise the fund by taking loans (borrowing) from banks. Loans taken from banks will not be called debt securities.

Another option for the company is to approach the market also known as the financial market, to borrow. When it approaches the financial market it issues certain papers to the lenders promising to pay interest for a certain time period and also return back the principal amount after a certain time. 

This paper creates debt to the company . These types of paper are also called debentures,bonds etc. As it can be freely bought and sold in the market it is also called as debt securities.

Public Issue 

When the company approaches the market and asks money from the public by issuing its shares or debentures etc it is called a public issue.

SEBI  chairperson : Madhuri Puri Buch

For SEBI kindly see our 28 February 2022 post also.

IC-814 hijacker Zahoor Ibrahim killed

Tags: Person in news

One of the five hijackers of the Indian Airline flight IC-814,Mistry Zahoor Ibrahim alias Jamali was killed by unidentified gunmen on 1 March 2022 in Karachi, Pakistan. 

• He was the last three surviving members of the Pakistani based terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed who hijacked the Indian Airlines flight IC-814 on 24 December 1999. The flight took off from Tribhuvan Airport Kathmandu, Nepal to New Delhi before it was hijacked and finally taken to Kandhar, Afghanistan. 

• Afghanistan was ruled by Talibans which provided support to the terrorist. One of the passengers of the plane, Rupen Katyal was killed by Zahoor Ibrahim on the plane.

• The cirisis was resolved when the government of India had to free three notorious terrorist Maulana Massod Azhar,Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar and Ahmed Omar Seikh in exchange for the passengers of the hijacked plane.

• Of the five hijackers, the surviving hijackers are Ibrahim Azhar the brother of Maulana Azhar and Rauf Asghar.

WHO Global centre for Traditional medicine in India .

Tags: National

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has signed an agreement with the  government of India to set up a WHO Global Centre for Traditional Medicine (WHO GCTM) in Jamnagar, Gujarat.

• The WHO centre will be under the Ministry of AYUSH. 

• It is the only such centre on traditional medicine  of WHO in the world.

Traditional Medicine 

• According to the WHO, Traditional medicine is the sum total of the knowledge, skill, and practices based on the theories, beliefs, and experiences indigenous to different cultures, used in the maintenance of health as well as in the prevention, diagnosis, improvement or treatment of physical and mental illness.

AYUSH (Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani, Siddha, Homoeopathy)

• The Ministry of AYUSH was set up on the 9th of November 2014 to revive  the knowledge of traditional Indian systems of medicine. 

• It focuses on education and research in the fields of Ayurveda, Yoga Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha, and Homoeopathy. 

• Minister of AYUSH: Sarbananda Sonowal

World Health Organisation (WHO)

• The World Health Organisation is a specialised agency of the United Nations which was founded on 7 April , 1948.

• Every year 7 April is celebrated as “World Health Day”.

• Headquarters of WHO : Geneva ,Switzerland 

• Director General of WHO :  Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus  of Ethiopia .

• He was elected as WHO director General  in 2017 and later re-elected in 2022 for a period of 5 years .

Petascale Supercomputer “PARAM Ganga” established at IIT Roorkee

Tags: Science and Technology

The National Supercomputing Mission has installed the Petascale Supercomputer “PARAM Ganga” at IIT Roorkee with a supercomputing capacity of 1.66 Petaflops.

• The National Supercomputing Mission (NSM)  is a joint project of  Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeiTY) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and it is being  implemented by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore.

• The National Supercomputing Mission was launched to enhance the research capacities and capabilities in the country by connecting them to form a Supercomputing grid, with National Knowledge Network (NKN) as the backbone.

• The Mission plans to build and deploy 24 facilities with cumulative compute power of more than 64 Petaflops. Till now C-DAC has deployed 11 systems at IISc, IITs, Indian Institute of Science and Education Research(IISER) Pune, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research( JNCASR) Bengaluru, National Agri-Food Biotechnology Institute (NABI),Mohali and C-DAC.

Important Information 

• The fastest supercomputer in the world is the Fugaku supercomputer located at RIKEN Centre for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan. It has a  computing speed of 415.5 petaflops.

• The fastest supercomputer in India is Param Pravega at the  Indian Institute of Science (IISC), Bengaluru It has a supercomputing capacity of 3.3 petaflops 

Petaflops 

• It refers to the computer which has a  capability to  calculate at least 10¹⁵ floating point operations per second.