Chandrayaan-2
Category: Sc& tech
- Chandrayaan-2 will have 14 Indian payloads or study devices.
- It weighs 3,800-kg.
- It includes
- an orbiter which will circle the moon at 100 km;
- a five-legged lander called Vikram that will descend on the moon .
- and a robotic rover, Pragyan, that will probe the lunar terrain around it.
- ISRO has chosen a landing area at the hitherto unexplored lunar south pole, making it the first agency to touch down at the south pole if it succeeds in its first landing attempt.
- ISRO will send the mission on its heavy lift booster, the MkIII, from Sriharikota.
- In 2008, ISRO had launched its orbiter mission Chandrayaan-1 on its PSLV booster.
- The spacecraft had 11 payloads.
Industrial Output
Category: Economy
- Growth in industrial activity dipped to a 21-month low in March, contracting 0.1% due in large part to a continuing slowdown in the manufacturing sector.
- The Index of Industrial Production (IIP) contracted in March for the first time since June 2013.
- IIP had grown by 5.3 per cent in March 2018, 4.6 per cent and 3.3 per cent in 2016-17 and 2015-16, respectively.
- The manufacturing sector constitutes 77.63 per cent of the IIP.
- One of the primary reasons for the slowdown in the overall economy is that the government has very little room to manoeuvre on the fiscal side (the fiscal deficit has exceeded the limits), even though the Reserve Bank of India has done what it can on the monetary policy side with two successive interest rate cuts.
Missing Firms
Category: Economy
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The Finance Ministry clarified that the ‘missing’ enterprises in the MCA-21 database did not have a significant impact on the calculation of growth rates of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and Gross Value Added (GVA) as these companies still added to the total output of the economy.
- The National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) in a recent survey report on the service sector found that, of a sample of 35,456 companies taken from the MCA-21 database, 38.7% were out-of-survey unit.
- These enterprises are engaged in some economic activity, possibly in the manufacturing sector for instance. As a result, they cannot be classified as out-of-coverage enterprises for the purposes of estimating the GDP of the country. In other words, the GDP estimates based on the out-of-coverage enterprises are very much a part of overall GDP of the country.
- In simpler terms, GDP estimates are affected by the share in the paid-up capital of the missing companies and not by their absolute number.
WTO
Category: International
- Developing countries participating in the World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial meeting in New Delhi are expected to prioritise discussions on measures to ensure the smooth functioning of the organization’s appellate body for dispute settlements.
- WTO’s appellate body is a standing body that hears appeals from reports issued by panels in disputes brought by the organization’s members.
- However, the appellate body has shrunk over the last two years from its required strength of seven members to three.This is because the United States has been blocking appointments of the body’s members.
