Karnataka

1. Supreme court panel asked BBMP to setup shelter homes for the homeless.

• This recommendation comes in the wake of an acute shortage of shelters for the homeless in the city. In 2010, the Supreme Court had directed all State governments to set up shelters in cities with a population of more than one lakh. However, in Bengaluru, which has a population of over a crore, there are only six such shelters, in place of the requisite 100.
• The committee, set up under the chairmanship of the former Chief Secretary Subhash Chandra Khuntia to review the progress of the functioning of these shelters under the Deen Dayal Anthyodaya Yojana – NULM, is expected to hold regular meetings and report the findings to the Centre.

2. Rejuvenation of Varthur Lake –Strategy.

• A bathymetric survey of the lake, conducted by the Indian Institute of Science to measure the depth of a particular waterbody and map its underwater features, had initially put the silt sedimentation at an estimated 6.82 million cubic metres.
• However, after the survey was conducted in 2016–17, a pipeline was laid from the Koramangala Challaghatta Valley to Kolar. For this, 2.7 km of the Varthur lake periphery was encroached upon. The National Green Tribunal took strong objection to this. The Minor Irrigation Department, which executed the Rs.13.4-crore project, has dumped thousands of tonnes of soil and construction debris.

3. RERA not implemented in Karnataka at all – System Failure.

• It has been over a year since the Real Estate Regulatory Authority (RERA) Act, 2016 came into effect in the State, but not a single property registered since then has been under the RERA rules. The reason is Karnataka is yet to come out with the ‘agreement of sale’ (AoS) specified in the Act.
• The AoS is touted to be advantageous to buyers, as the builder will have to clearly mention the carpet area, super built-up area and other details in the document.

4. Pollution & Ban on 2 stroke autos.

• A mere ban on two-stroke autorickshaws will do little to reduce the pollution burden in the city, while a phase-wise introduction of electric autorickshaws may lead to a reduction of more than 4.4 lakh tonnes of carbon dioxide emitted annually.
• A recent study on the emissions by autorickshaws in the city, conducted by The Energy Research Institute (TERI), shows that if all two-stroke autorickshaw drivers switched to four-stroke models, the emission saved by the city is a mere 20,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide pollution. This is barely a dent in the 4.5 lakh tonnes of the pollutant being released by autorickshaws.
• Moreover, with around 1.5 lakh autorickshaws being added to the city’s roads every five years, the pollution burden owing to this will also increase by 5 lakh tonnes of carbon emissions, states the study which was conducted as part of the European Union Switch Asia programme to understand the autorickshaw sector in Bengaluru and Chennai.

5. Karnataka’s 74% of the farm households are indebted : NABARD

• The NABARD All India Rural Financial Inclusion Survey 2016-17 covered a sample of 1.88 lakh people from 40,327 rural households. Only 48% of these are defined as agricultural households, which have at least one member self-employed in agriculture and which received more than Rs. 5,000 as value of produce from agricultural activities over the past year, whether they possessed any land or not.
• The southern States of Telangana (79%), Andhra Pradesh (77%), and Karnataka (74%) showed the highest levels of indebtedness among agricultural households, followed by Arunachal Pradesh (69%), Manipur (61%), Tamil Nadu (60%), Kerala (56%), and Odisha (54%).

General

1. India still power deficit country.Overall deficit = 0.9%

• India is still not power surplus as envisaged because peak power deficit in April-July was 0.9%, while overall electricity deficit stood at 0.6% during the four-month period this fiscal.
• As much as 170.76 GW was supplied during peak hours against the demand of 172.38 GW in April-July this fiscal, resulting in a deficit of 0.9%, the Central Electricity Authority’s (CEA) latest power supply data showed.

2. Falling Rupee & Effect & Reason

What happens to inflation?

• One of the first visible effects of currency depreciation is the country’s imports become more expensive and exports cheaper. The reason is simple. It takes more rupees to pay for the same quantum of imports and fewer dollars for a buyer to pay for the same quantity of exports.
• More expensive imports are likely to drive inflation upward, especially in India where input products constitute a large part of our imports. In addition, a depreciating rupee also impacts the oil import bill since it costs more rupees per barrel of oil, which plays its own part in pushing inflation up.

What happens to GDP growth?

• This is a more complex question given the number of factors that affect GDP growth. On the one hand, costlier inputs and the subsequent increase in the prices of finished goods should have a positive impact on GDP. But the consequent decrease in demand due to higher prices could nullify this.
• This is best explained using the textbook formula of aggregate demand equalling the sum of household consumption of goods and services, investment, government expenditure on goods and services, and exports minus imports.
• A depreciating rupee certainly affects the exports and imports, since exports are likely to receive a boost while imports could flag somewhat. It remains to be seen what impact a reduction in household consumption would have on demand, especially when the festive season is nearing.

Reason:

• While the rupee is Asia’s worst performing currency so far this year, the depreciation is largely owing to the dollar strengthening rather than any inherent weakness in the domestic unit.

3. Tech giants reluctance towards data localisation of Indian Government.
4. Sri Lanka’s 18^th & 19^th

• Sri Lanka’s former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, who served two consecutive terms in office from 2005 to 2015, appears keen on a third, despite a legislation barring him from contesting.
• The 19th Amendment to Sri Lanka’s Constitution, passed in January 2015, revived a clause in the 1978 Constitution that said: “No person who has been twice elected to the office of President by the People, shall be qualified thereafter to be elected to such office by the People.”

 

5. Russia – Germany Summit

• Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel discussed the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria, as well as Iran and a gas pipeline project that has drawn U.S. ire during talks outside Berlin that ended with no clear-cut progress.
• The U.S. is pressing Berlin to halt the pipeline that will carry gas from Russia under the Baltic Sea, arguing that it will increase Germany’s dependence on Russia for energy. Ukraine fears the pipeline will allow Russia to cut it off from the gas transit business, while Germany’s Eastern European neighbours worry about Russian encroachment.

6. Parliamentary Committee on Estimate invited Raghuram Rajan  for  suggesting solutions for NPA headache. crutinising the issue of increasing non-performing assets (NPAs) a parliamentary committee on estimates headed by senior BJP leader Murli Manohar Joshi has asked former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan to appear before it.