PCA
Category: Economy
- Three more banks — Allahabad Bank and Corporation Bank, from the public sector, and Dhanlaxmi Bank from the private sector — are now out of the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) prompt and corrective action (PCA) framework.
- Earlier, such restrictions were taken off Bank of India, Oriental Bank of Commerce and Bank of Maharashtra. Six more under PCA
- There are another six banks that are still under PCA framework.
- These two banks had received capital infusion from the government. This has shored up their capital funds and also increased their loan loss provision to ensure that the PCA parameters were complied with.
- PCA framework gets triggered when a bank breaches one of the three risk thresholds. Crossing 6% net NPA is one of them.
Fiscal deficit
Category: Economy
- Fiscal deficit widened in January to ₹7.7 lakh crore, or 121.5% of the Budget Estimates for the full year.
- The fiscal deficit figure works out to 5.5% of GDP for the year.
- Finance Minister had in the Budget 2019-20 said that the fiscal deficit would come to 3.4% of GDP in 2018-19, marginally higher than the targeted 3.3%.
Gynandromorph
Category : General Science
- Gynandromorph is a butterfly with a colour and pattern that are distinctly male on one wing and female on the other.
- Scientists say these instances of split-sex animals and insects could offer clues to why some human diseases strike one sex more than the other.
- Mammals have X and Y chromosomes, birds and insects have Z and W, and some reptiles can change their sex depending on temperature, or a combination of temperature and sex chromosomes.
- How gynandromorphs are born at all still remains a mystery. For birds, the most likely explanation is that a female makes an unusual double-nucleus egg cell, one with a Z chromosome and one with a W chromosome, and each is fertilized by a Z sperm, making some cells ZZ and others ZW in the same individual. The same process is very unlikely to happen in mammals.
WTO
Category: International
- The US decision to block selection of judges at the World Trade Organization’s Appellate Body has impacted India’s attempt to get a ruling on its case challenging a verdict against safeguard duties imposed by the country on imports of iron and steel.
- The US blocked the appointment of appeals judges at the WTO last year which has now resulted in shrinking of the number of judges from seven to just three.
- US has said that it will allow judges to be appointed only after reforms are brought about in the WTO decision-making process.
- India’s case which has got stuck at the WTO is related to imposition of provisional safeguard duty — a levy that a member can apply over and above the existing import tariffs to protect domestic industry against import surges — of 20 per cent on import of certain categories of steel.
Energy efficiency ratings
Category: Environment
- Residential buildings can now save up 40 per cent of their energy consumption and be rated for the same by the Bureau of Energy Efficiency.
- Till now, the rating was only for commercial establishments.
Credit ratings
Category: Economy
- Rating agency Crisil has said that global and national AAA ratings cannot be compared as they are done on different scales and are relative to a country’s rating.
- It said that credit ratings are relative assessments of credit risk and the relative benchmarking can be national, global or regional.
National Electronic Policy 2019
Category: Economy
- The last electronic policy was unveiled 2012.
- The new policy targets
- $400 billion turnover by 2025 from domestic manufacturing,
- setting up cluster for the entire value chain and
- employing over one crore people directly or otherwise to achieve a growth rate of 32 per cent.
