Daily updates 30 July 2019

National

1. LCU L56 ship was commissioned into Indian Navy

i. Indian Navy Ship LCU L-56, the sixth of the Landing Craft Utility (LCU) MK IV class ships, was commissioned into the Indian Navy by Vice-Admiral Atul Kumar Jain, Flag Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Eastern Naval Command, at Naval Dockyard.
ii.Commissioning the ship, the Vice-Admiral congratulated the GRSE (Garden Reach Shipbuilders and Engineers) for being the first shipyard in the country to have built the 100th warship.

Static/Current Takeaways Important For RRB NTPC/IBPS RRB Main 2019:

• Chief of the Naval Staff: Admiral Karambir Singh. 

State News

2. Odisha Rasagola gets Geographical Indications Tag

i. The rasagola, a popular dessert of Odisha, has received the geographical indication tag from the Registrar of Geographical Indication. 
ii. The GI number 612 has been registered in favour of the Odisha Small Industries Corporation Limited.
iii. Historical records submitted say the ‘Odisha Rasagola’ is associated with world famous Puri Jagannath Temple.

Static/Current Takeaways Important For SBI Clerk Main:

• CM of Odisha: Naveen Patnaik; Governor of Odisha: Ganeshi Lal.

3. Odisha Secretariat renamed Lok Seva Bhavan

i. Odisha Chief Minister announced in the State Assembly that the Sachivalaya or Secretariat building in Bhubaneswar will now be called ‘Lok Seva Bhavan’. 

ii. The Odisha Secretariat building was inaugurated on November 12, 1959.

Static/Current Takeaways Important For RRB NTPC/IBPS RRB Main 2019:

• Chief Minister of Odisha: Naveen Patnaik; Governor of Odisha: Ganeshi Lal.

4. J&K District Administration Udhampur launches helpline “Jeene Do”

i. Jammu and Kashmir, District Administration Udhampur has launched a helpline, “Jeene Do”. 
ii.The objective is to improve sex ratio and deal with defaulters of Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques PCPNDT Act under the Centrally sponsored Beti Bachao Beti Padhao scheme.  
iii. A Mobile Number 9469793363 has been dedicated to the public to register complaints regarding sex determination during prenatal checkups.

Static/Current Takeaways Important For EPFO/LIC ADO Main 2019:

• Governor of Jammu & Kashmir: Satya Pal Malik.

Banking

5. RBI fines Mobikwik & Hip Bar for violating norms

i. The Reserve Bank of India has imposed a penalty on two online payment solutions providers ii. Mobikwik Systems and Hip Bar for non compliance of regulatory guidelines.
iii. Mobikwik Systems Private Limited has been slapped a fine of Rs 15 lakh while Hip Bar Pvt Ltd faced a fine of Rs 10.85 lakh.

Static/Current Takeaways Important For SBI Clerk Mains:

• Governor of RBI: Shaktikant Das; Headquarters: Mumbai; Founded: 1 April 1935, Kolkata.

Agreements

6. India signs MoUs with Benin

i. India and Benin signed four MoUs on education, health and e-visa facilities.
ii. The signing of the agreement on mutual exemption of visa requirement for holders of diplomatic and official passports and agreement on the fresh line of credit of 100 million US dollars by India to finance development projects in Benin.
iii. Benin also extended its support for India's candidature for permanent membership of UN Security Council.

Static/Current Takeaways Important For SBI Clerk Main 2019:

• President of Benin: Patrice Talon; Capital of Benin: Porto-Novo.
• Currency of Benin: West African CFA franc.

7. India, Myanmar signs MoU on Defence Co-Operation

i. Minister of State for Defence and Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, Commander-in-Chief of Defence Services of Myanmar signed MoU to enhancing defence co-operation, review joint exercises and training provided to Myanmar Defence Services, strengthen maritime security by joint surveillance and capacity building, medical co-operation, pollution response and for developing new infrastructure.

Static/Current Takeaways Important For SBI Clerk Main 2019:

• President of Myanmar: Win Myint; Capital of Myanmar: Naypyitaw.

8. Nepal PM inaugurates India-Nepal Logistics Summit

i. Prime Minister of Nepal inaugurated India-Nepal Logistics Summit between India and Nepal in Kathmandu. 
ii. The theme of the summit was “Transforming Logistics Landscape”. 
iii. The aim of the bilateral cooperation is initiatives have been taken on crucial components of road, rail, inland waterways and air connectivity.

Static/Current Takeaways Important For SBI Clerk Main :

• Prime Minister of Nepal: K P Sharma Oli; Capital of Nepal: Kathmandu.
• President of Nepal: Bidhya Devi Bhandari; Currency of Nepal: Nepalese rupee.

Awards

9. Vidisha Baliyan was crowned the Miss Deaf World 2019 title

i. Vidisha Baliyan, a 21 year old girl from Uttar Pradesh's Muzaffarnagar city, was crowned the Miss Deaf World 2019 title. 
ii. The international beauty pageant was held in Mbombela, South Africa.
iii. She is a former international tennis player who represented India in the Deaflympics and also won a silver medal.

Obituaries

10. Former Andhra Pradesh state Minister Mukesh Goud passes away

i. Former Andhra Pradesh congress state Minister M. Mukesh Goud passed away. The Congress leader was suffering from cancer. 
ii. He served as BC Welfare and Marketing Minister in Y.S. Rajasekhar Reddy and Kiran Kumar Reddy Cabinets.

Sports

11. Sniper Frontier Competition: 2019

i. A 9 member Indian Army team has left for Belarus to compete in the Sniper Frontier Competition as part of the International Army Games scheduled on 03 Aug to 17 Aug 2019.
ii. A intense sniper competition and encompassing flexibility of mind, physical fitness along with firing. 
iii. The competition is likely to have over 23 participating countries including Russia & China.

Static/Current Takeaways Important For RRB NTPC/IBPS RRB Main 2019:

• Chief of the Army Staff: General Bipin Rawat.

12.  Former France defender Patrice Evra announced retirement

i. Former France and Manchester United defender Patrice Evra has announced his retirement. 
ii. He had played 81 times for France and also captained the side at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. 
iii. He went on to make almost 300 appearances for the Manchester United club, winning 5 League titles and the Champions League.

13.  Collin Morikawa wins the US PGA title

i. American Collin Morikawa has won the US PGA title at the Barracuda Championship. 

This was his 1st win in the US PGA title. 
ii. It is the only US tour event that uses the Modified Stableford scoring system. 
iii. US's Troy Merritt finished as the runner up of the event.

14. Tamil Nadu girl wins gold medal in World Deaf title

i. Tamil Nadu girl Jerlin Anika has won the gold medal in the World Deaf Youth Badminton Championships held in Taipei. 
ii. 15-year-old Anika bagged four medals in the championship, including the gold, two silver and one bronze.

Static/Current Takeaways Important For EPFO/LIC ADO Main 2019:

• President of Taiwan: Tsai Ing-wen; Currency of Taiwan: Taiwanese Dollar.

15. Dalilah Muhammad shatters 400m hurdles World record

i. Olympic champion Dalilah Muhammad shattered one of the longest standing records in women’s athletics with a superb display to clinch victory in the 400m hurdles at US Championships.
ii. Dalilah Muhammad took more than a tenth of a second off a record that had stood for 16 years, clocking 52.20 seconds to beat Russian Yuliya Pechonkina's previous mark of 52.34 seconds.

Important Days

16. World Day Against Trafficking in Persons: 30 July

i. United Nations observes 30 July every year as World Day Against Trafficking. In 2013, the General Assembly designated July 30 as the World Day against Trafficking in Persons to raise awareness of the situation of victims of human trafficking and for the promotion and protection of their rights.
ii. On the 2019 World Day UNODC is focusing on highlighting the importance of Government action with a tagline:
iii. Human Trafficking: call your government to action

Static/Current Takeaways Important For EPFO/LIC ADO Mains:

• Headquarters of the UN: New York, USA; Founded: 24 October 1945.
• Secretary General of the United Nations: Antonio Guterres.

Srividya Kannan, Founder and CEO, Avaali Solutions interview

This is a TechGig Exclusive interview ofSrividya Kannan, Founder and CEO, Avaali Solutions. In this interview, she talks about the top technologies, new-age tech hiring solutions like hackathon and the existing underrepresentation of women in technology. 

#1. Please give us a brief overview of your company and about yourself. 

Avaali is a consulting and professional services company focused on supporting upper mid to large enterprises to create and execute their Digital roadmap. We are headquartered in Bengaluru, India. We believe that Digital is going to be the biggest enabler of revenues for enterprises. We support our customers to maximize value from digital and help them translate this value in the form of innovative customer experience, highly engaging customers, internal process efficiencies, reduced costs and delivering our customer’s stated objective. 

We’ve worked with over 120+ large enterprises to leverage digital technologiesto help them significantly accelerate process agility and reduce costs. We have subsidiaries in Singapore and UAE and our clients are spread across Asia, Middle East and Africa. Our Avaali Academy provides training to build capacity of people with knowledge on technologies such as Information Management, RPA and Chatbot.

#2. Prior to founding Avaali Solutions, you were working for large enterprises like Wipro and SAP. What are some of the challenges a tech startup like yours faces when compared with these big tech companies? 

Our focus segment are large enterprises as they have the process and technology maturity to adopt our solutions focusing on unstructured content. Being a startup, the initial set of challenges included building enough trust for our customers to engage with us for their requirements. This takes time as one needs to consistently demonstrate results by delivering business outcomes. It took us 18 months to get our first client. As we get into new geographies, this continues to be something we will have to deal with quite regularly. 

#3. Can you tell us about some of the top technologies that you are betting big on to develop your tech solutions?

We believe that when technologies like RPA, AI, Chatbot, OCR and Information Management solutions come together, they could be extremely powerful to deliver process agility for large enterprises. We’ve therefore invested in our framework called ‘Velocious’ that brings together these technologies to offer a set of ready-to-deploy solutions for enterprises. 

It is estimated that by 2021, the RPA market will reach $2.9B. Enterprises are sitting on large volumes of structured and unstructured data and they recognize the need to have visibility and availability of this information to their process owners as and when they need it. More than 80% of enterprises will use conversational AI to engage with their stakeholders and deliver tasks. 

Velocious will connect to our customer’s applications thus making the best use of their existing landscape while filling in the process automation gaps with emerging technologies. 

#4. For a bootstrapped venture like Avaali Solutions, how difficult was it initially to attract top tech talent to work for you?

It was quite difficult during our initial years to attract talent. We made pitches to prospective employees as much as we made to prospective customers. Eventually, as we started acquiring customer logos and got better at our share of market presence, it started getting better. 

#5. What are your views on hackathonswhich are fast-emerging as the go-to platforms to find quality tech solutions, especially in emerging technologies for which there exists a talent crunch?

Hackathons are a very powerful way to attract good quality talent. They help identify people with innovative ideas, technical and entrepreneurial skills. They also stimulate innovative thinking, collaboration and problem solving amongst developers. It is a great way to connect with great talent and make lasting connections. 

#6. At TechGig, we are behind India’s largest women-only coding competition called Geek Goddess. As an accomplished women technology leader and if you could do a root cause analysis of the issue, what will be some of your suggestions to improve the underrepresentation of women in technology?

It is quite unfortunate that the ratio of male to female workers is quite skewed in the STEM field. This only gets worse in terms of leadership positions. We absolutely need more women in technology. There are still glaring gender discriminations and biases. There are only one in five countries that achieve gender parity where women make close to 45-55% of researchers. The irony is that there are adequate number of young girls aspiring for a career in STEM during their education years and several do pass with high rankings. However, as they progress in their career, there are many who choose to step back due to family and other personal commitments. 

The first step is to recognize this as a serious issue to be able to make the change happen. There needs to be a concentrated effort to attract more women into STEM education. Enterprises could execute mentoring initiatives where their female workforce could get to speak to other successful female mentors in the industry. Enterprises would need to put in specific methods to recognize subconscious bias in their HR processes right from recruitment through to reviews and promotions. Having a good balance of female to male decision makers will certainly help. 

Daily updates 27 July 2019

National

1. First printing press heritage gallery opened by Railway's
i. The Western Railway General Stores Depot (GSD) has become the first in Indian Railways to opened a heritage gallery of the printing and allied machines used in the Western Railway Printing Press since (1948) at Mahalaxmi in Mumbai. 

Static/Current Takeaways Important For EPFO/LIC ADO Main 2019:

• Union Railway Minister: Piyush Goyal.
• Headquarter of Western Railway: Churchgate (Mumbai).

2. Kaiga Atomic Energy station sets a World record
i. Kaiga Atomic Energy station (Karnataka) sets a World Record in continuous operation of 962 days by Unit-1 of Kaiga Generating Station (KGS-1) among nuclear power plants of all technologies.
ii. KGS-1 (220 MW) in an indigenous Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors (PHWR) fuelled by domestic fuel which started commercial operation on November 16, 2000.

3. Kargil veteran Lt Col Dr Samir Rawat invited to ICP
i. Kargil veteran Lt Col Dr Samir Rawat has been invited as an eminent keynote speaker at the 32nd International Congress of Psychology 2020 (ICP) in Prague which is the most prestigious and biggest international event in the psychological world with over 8000 delegates participating in ICP..

State News

4. CM Naveen Patnaik launches revamped Odisha Tourism website
i. Chief Minister of odisha launched the revamped website of Odisha Tourism, odishatourism.gov.in.
ii. The website involves a pilot implementation of an e-commerce platform for Odisha handlooms and handicrafts by promoting state brands Boyanika and Utkalika.

Static/Current Takeaways Important For EPFO/LIC ADO Main 2019:

• CM of Odisha: Naveen Patnaik, Governor of Odisha: Ganeshi Lal.

5. Gujarat tops in rooftop solar installation across the country
i. Gujarat ranks on top in the installation of rooftop solar projects with an installed capacity of 261.97 megawatts.
ii. Total rooftop solar installation in India currently stands at 1,700.54 MW. 
iii. Gujarat is followed by Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu with 198.52 MW and 151.62 MW.

Static/Current Takeaways Important For SBI Clerk Main 2019:

• CM of Gujarat : Vijay Rupani; Governor of Gujarat: Acharya Dev Vrat.
• Capital of Gujarat: Gandhinagar.

6. Arunachal CM launches tree plantation programme
i. Chief Minister of Arunachal Pradesh launched the statewide tree plantation programme ‘Clean-Green Arunachal Campaign 2019’ in Itanagar. 
ii. Under this campaign State Forest department had planted 1-lakh tree saplings in 24 hours.
iii. This campaign is a part of Van Mahotsav celebration and has set the target of planting 1 Crore tree within the next five years.

Static/Current Takeaways Important For SBI Clerk Main 2019:

• Chief Minister of Arunachal Pradesh: Pema Khandu.
• Governor of Arunachal Pradesh: B. D. Mishra.

Agreements

7. Team India gets a new sponsor
i. The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has announced that Bengaluru-based education and learning app Byju's, which is owned by Think and Learn Private Limited, has replaced Oppo India as the official Team India sponsor.

Appointments

8. Kapil Dev led CAC to pick Team India's head coach
i. Cricket Advisory Committee (CAC) led by World Cup-winning former captain Kapil Dev entrusted with the responsibility of selecting India's new coach.
ii. Apart from Kapil, former women's captain Shantha Rangaswamy and former men's coach Anshuman Gaekwad have also in the panel.

Sports

9. Dressel breaks the Phelps record in 100m butterfly stroke
i. American star Caeleb Dressel destroyed Michael Phelps’s World record in the 100 metres butterfly at the World Aquatics Championships 2019 in Gwangju (South Korea).
ii. Caeleb Dressel take 49.50 seconds in the semi-final event and breaking the old record of 49.82 seconds set by Michael Phelps.

10. Chandigarh gets BCCI affiliation
i. Chandigarh received affiliation from the Board of Control for Cricket in India(BCCI) after nearly four decades.
ii. After getting BCCI affiliation, Chandigarh Cricket Association-Punjab had recently decided to merge with Union Territory Cricket Association, thus paving way for the Union Territory to be recognised as a separate entity.

Static/Current Takeaways Important For RRB NTPC/IBPS RRB Main 2019:

• President of BCCI: C.K. Khanna; Headquarters of BCCI : Mumbai.