TELANGANA
- Telangana high court tells Telangana govt to improve school learning
- Expressing serious concern over the continuing decline in learning outcomes of students in government schools, the Telangana High Court has directed the state government to come up with concrete proposals to improve the situation.
- The bench feared that falling education standards might be linked to pushing privatisation of education. It felt that reimbursing fees may not be a right idea.
- HC said, the government and private agencies were measuring the level of learning outcomes but steps to improve the situation were lacking.
INTERNATIONAL
- Rio de Janeiro will be World Capital of Architecture for 2020: UNESCO
- The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has announced that the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro will be the World Capital of Architecture for 2020.
- Having defeated Paris and Melbourne, Rio will be the first city to receive the title under a program launched together by UNESCO and the International Union of Architects (UIA) in November last year. The city will host the World Congress of UIA, in July 2020, an event that occurs every three years.
- World’s oldest man Masazo Nonaka dies at 113
- The world’s oldest man, Masazo Nonaka of Japan, has died at the age of 113. According to the Kyodo News agency, Nonaka, who was officially recognized as the oldest male in the world by Guinness World Records last April, passed away at his home in the north of Japan’s Hokkaido Island.
- The record-holder was born in 1905 in the town of Ashoro.
- The Japanese are traditionally considered to be one of the most long-living people on the planet.
NATIONAL
- India to surpass UK in world’s largest economy rankings in 2019: PwC
- India is likely to surpass the United Kingdom in the world’s largest economy rankings in 2019, to become world’s fifth largest economy, according to a report by global consultancy firm PwC.
- PwC’s Global Economy Watch report projects real GDP growth of 1.6 per cent for the UK, 1.7 per cent for France and 7.6 per cent for India in 2019.
- According to World Bank data, India became the world’s sixth largest economy in 2017 surpassing France and was likely to go past the UK which stood at the fifth position.
- 15th Pravasi Bhartiya Divas begins at Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh
- The 15th edition of Pravasi Bhartiya Divas begins at Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh. It is being organized in Varanasi for the first time.
- The theme this year is, ‘Role of Indian Diaspora in building New India’.
- Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (PBD) is celebrated once in two years to strengthen the engagement of the overseas Indian community with the Government, reconnect them with their roots and celebrate their achievements and contributions.
- Railways links locomotives via ISRO satellites to automatically feed train status
- The Indian Railways has linked its locomotives via ISRO satellites, making it easy to track trains and automatically feed the control charts about the trains arrival and departure.
- The train movement information is acquired and fed to the control charts using ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) satellite-based real-time train information system (RTIS)
- The RTIS device installed in the locomotive detects position and speed of the train using GAGAN geo-positioning system, developed by ISRO.
- Based on this information and application logic, the device sends the train movement updates (arrival/departure/run through/unscheduled stoppages and mid-section updates) to central location server in the CRIS data centre using S-band Mobile Satallite Service (MSS) of ISRO
- 12 states including TN clock higher GDP growth than nation
- As many as 12 out of 17 states in the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) non-special category including Tamil Nadu (TN) grew faster than the 6.7% pace clocked by the national economy during fiscal 2018 (2017-18), according to ratings agency Crisil’s report ‘States of growth 2.0’. TN recorded 8.2% growth during the year, the seventh highest among states.
However, this growth hasn’t been equitable. Low-income states have not sustained high growth long enough to meaningfully bridge the per-capita income gap with the high-income states. In fact, the chasm is widening.
- On the fiscal front, most states veered off the ‘Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act’ (FRBM) line. Due to little fiscal legroom for the centre and increased share of states in central transfers, states are now the new engines of public spending.
- Although Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka and Bihar were the biggest spenders overall, Rajasthan, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and Telangana topped the list of states that spent the most out of their budget on capex, the agency.
- The debt ratio was over 30% in Punjab, Rajasthan and Kerala, while Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra and Karnataka managed to keep it relatively low.