Daily Current Affairs for UPSC CSE
Topics Covered
- Domestic Systematically Important Banks
- Ivermectin
- Supercomputer
1 . Domestic Systematically Important Banks
Context : SBI, ICICI Bank and HDFC Bank continue to be in the Reserve Bank of India’s list of Domestic Systemically Important Banks (D-SIBs) for 2018.
What is Domestic Systematically Important Banks
- D-SIB means that the bank is too big to fail. According to the RBI, some banks become systemically important due to their size, cross-jurisdictional activities, complexity and lack of substitute and interconnection.
- Banks whose assets exceed 2% of GDP are considered part of this group.
- The RBI stated that should such a bank fail, there would be significant disruption to the essential services they provide to the banking system and the overall economy.
- The too-big-to-fail tag also indicates that in case of distress, the government is expected to support these banks. Due to this perception, these banks enjoy certain advantages in funding. It also means that these banks have a different set of policy measures regarding systemic risks and moral hazard issues.
Classification
- As per the framework, from 2015, every August, the central bank has to disclose names of banks designated as D-SIB.
- It classifies the banks under five buckets depending on order of importance. ICICI Bank and HDFC Bank are in bucket one while SBI falls in bucket three.
- Based on the bucket in which a D-SIB is, an additional common equity requirement applies.
- Banks in bucket one need to maintain a 0.15% incremental tier-I capital from April 2018. Banks in bucket three have to maintain an additional 0.45%.
- With bucket three being higher than bucket one, SBI has a higher additional requirement than ICICI Bank and HDFC Bank.
- All the banks under D-SIB are required to maintain higher share of risk-weighted assets as tier-I equity.
2 . Ivermectin
Context : A mosquito-killing drug tested in Burkina Faso reduced malaria cases by a fifth among children and could be an important new tool in the global fight against the disease, researchers said.
About the drug
- The drug, ivermectin, is already widely used to treat parasitic infections but had not previously been tested for its effects on malaria incidence
- When people take ivermectin it makes their blood lethal to the mosquitoes that bite them, thereby reducing the likelihood that others will be bitten and infected
- It could potentially be used in combination with other malaria control methods to protect more people.
- It is on the WHO list of essential medicines, the most effective and safe medicines needed in a health system
3 . Supercomputer
Context : Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, is all set to ramp up its research and development activities with the acquisition of a 1.3 petaflop high power computing facility and a data centre under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM).
About the News
- The institute signed a memorandum of understanding with the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) this week to facilitate supply, installation, commissioning and operations of the system.
- The research activities will include building hardware and software for high performance computing systems, data management, analytics, and visualizations. In addition, the system will be used for research in computational biology, drug design, atmospheric modelling, computational fluid dynamics, modelling of novel materials, computational chemistry and physics, numerical mathematics, computational mechanics, and non-equilibrium molecular dynamics.
- The new facility is likely to ready for use in three to four months. All the products and accessories will be designed and manufactured within the country
About National Supercomputing Mission
- The Mission envisages empowering our national academic and R&D institutions spread over the country by installing a vast supercomputing grid comprising of more than 70 high-performance computing facilities.
- These supercomputers will also be networked on the National Supercomputing grid over the National Knowledge Network (NKN). The NKN is another programme of the government which connects academic institutions and R&D labs over a high speed network.
- Academic and R&D institutions as well as key user departments/ministries would participate by using these facilities and develop applications of national relevance.
- The Mission also includes development of highly professional High Performance Computing (HPC) aware human resource for meeting challenges of development of these applications.
- The Mission implementation would bring supercomputing within the reach of the large Scientific & Technology community in the country and enable the country with a capacity of solving multi-disciplinary grand challenge problems.
Objective
- To make India one of the world leaders in Supercomputing and to enhance India’s capability in solving grand challenge problems of national and global relevance
- To empower our scientists and researchers with state-of-the-art supercomputing facilities and enable them to carry out cutting-edge research in their respective domains
- To minimize redundancies and duplication of efforts, and optimize investments in supercomputing
- To attain global competitiveness and ensure self-reliance in the strategic area of supercomputing technology