The Daily Brief – 1st November 2018

The 19th meeting of Financial Stability and Development Council (FSDC) was held in New Delhi under the Chairmanship of Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley. FSDC is super regulatory body for regulating financial sector which is vital for bringing healthy and efficient financial system in economy of the country. It was set up in 2010 by then Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee. Union Finance Minister is chairman of FSDC.

According to recently released Global Soil Biodiversity Atlas prepared by World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), India is among nations that face grave danger to soil biodiversity. The atlas was released as part of WWF’s bi-annual Living Planet Report (LPR) 2018. The key aspect of this year’s report was threat to soil biodiversity and pollinators, the two key drivers of biodiversity. These two key drivers loss were due to over exploitation of natural resources and agriculture. India was coloured red on atlas and is among countries whose soil biodiversity faces the highest level of risk.

India observed Rashtriya Ekta Diwas, also known as National Unity Day, on October 31, 2018 to commemorate the 143rd birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the Iron Man of India. On this occasion, Prime Minister Narendra Modi dedicated world’s tallest ‘Statue of Unity’ to the nation at Kevadiya in Narmada district of Gujarat. The Prime Minister also unveiled the ‘Wall of Unity’, a wall created with the earth samples collected from various states across the country. The statue will be 182m tall that is double the size of New York’s Statue of Liberty (93 metres). Sardar Patel was the first deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister of India in 1947.

The Trilokpuri Sanjay Lake to Shiv Vihar section of the Delhi Metro Pink Line was flagged off by Union Minister Hardeep Singh Puri and Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia on October 31, 2018. With opening of this 17.86 km long section, Delhi Metro joined the league of top metro networks around the world which have an operational length of over 300 km. Delhi Metro Network has now become 314 kilometres long with 229 metro stations.

Anupam Kher on October 31, 2018 resigned as Chairman of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), citing international film and TV assignments. He had been working as chairman since October 2017. Prior to Kher, Gajendra Chauhan was the Chairman of FTII who left office in March 2017. Established in 1960, FTII is an autonomous institute under the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and is aided by the Central Government. It is situated on the premises of the erstwhile Prabhat Film Company in Pune.

Nobel Prize Winner Malala Yousafzai will be honoured by Harvard University for her work promoting girls’ education. Yousafzai will be conferred with the 2018 Gleitsman Award at a ceremony on December 6. Yousafzai became the youngest person to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014. Yousafzai is a student at Oxford University in England. The Gleitsman Award provides 125,000 US dollars for activism that has improved quality of life around the world.

Odisha Government has launched an automatic public address system to warn citizens about cyclone, tsunami and floods. This is the first of its kind technology in field of Early Warning Dissemination System (EWDS) in India. It’s a part of the last-mile connectivity programme under the National Cyclone Risk Mitigation Project an aimed at protecting people from the cyclone effects.