Indian Current Affairs: 20.12.2006

Ashok Ghosh (84), State Secretary of Forward Bloc has demanded that each of the 4,068 farmers who have relinquished their plots for the proposed Tata Motors project in Singur should be given one share in Tata Motors.
Most probably this may be a faux pas on his part.

India finally registered its first win in the current tour of South Africa with a win at the Wanderers, Johannesburg.

Advertisements can be targeted to specific groups, who could be potential customers.
This can be best understood by an example. If Domino’s site appears through Google to only customers who have a Domino’s branch nearby, that is targeted advertising. Suppose the city or the area from where we surfing the web does not have a Domino’s branch, there is no point our being targeted with Domino’s ads.

A power exchange is a common trading platform to ensure transparency and efficiency in power trading market in the country. There is no such exchange at present in India. Electricity is traded bilaterally through mutually agreed rates.
The CEA (Central Electricity Authority) has suggested that power trading can be kick started by assigning 10% of the unallocated power to the exchange.

He is currently on a visit to India. He is rated as the world’s most successful speculator.
He authored a book titled “The Age of Fallibility”, which was released during his visit.

They include ilmenite, rutile and leucoxene.
India is the world’s larges reservoir of ilmenite with about 400 million tonnes, which is about 30.42% of the world’s reserves.
Ilmenite yields titanium metals.
Thus India is comfortably placed to tap a shift in preference from steel to titanium.
The new National Mineral Policy is not likely to throw open mining of the beach sand minerals, as they are treated as atomic minerals. Atomic minerals are regulated by the DAE (Department of Atomic Energy) while all other minerals are regulated by the Department of Mines.

The fundamentals of the stock markets today are much stronger than the July 1997 situation for the following reasons:

Asian central banks are sitting on huge stockpiles of reserves.
Most of the countries (barring India and Pakistan) are running healthy current account surpluses.
Global liquidity is also comfortable.
Overseas investors no longer tar all emerging markets with the same brush. They now distinguish between different markets.

With the first wave of economic reforms the government fashioned a set of new companies and organizations, structured differently from the traditional PSUs
These institutions utilized their autonomy to great effect and did remarkably well
The patchy nature of the boards also helped these hybrid institutions survive
Examples of these types of institutions include: NSE, UTI Bank, ILFS (Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services), CSDL (Central Securities Depository Limited), IIFCL (India Infrastructure Finance Company Limited), ICICI Bank and HDFC Bank etc.

The man who helped create the world’s best loved cartoon characters like Tom & Jerry, Fred Flintstone and Yogi Bear has died at the age of 95.
The other person in two man team viz., William Hanna passed away in 2001 at the age of 90.

Draught beer (also called draft beer or tap beer) is beer that has been served from, or has been conditioned in, a cask.
We can understand the difference between two types of beer easily when we look at bottled beer.
This may look very simple for tipplers; but for those who don’t know the ABCs of liquors it could be confusing.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (super - cali - fragil - istic - expialid - ocious - ) is a song and a long word from the movie Mary Poppins (and in the musical version)
The word is used as an adjective referring to "absolutely stunningly fantastic".

Indian Current Affairs