Exercise Samudra Laksamana
New edition of Exercise Samudra Laksamana conducted recently.
- Exercise Samudra Laksamana –A bilateral Naval Exercise
- Between – India and Malaysia
Sugar Development Fund (SDF)
To provide relief to sugar mills, the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food & Public Distribution has revised guidelines for restructuring of loans taken under SDF.
- Revised guidelines – Provide sugar factories option of debt restructuring and One Time Settlement.
- SDF – Provides financial assistance to sugar factories at concessional interest rates in accordance with SDF Act 1982 and SDF Rules 1983.
- Scope – Assistance is provided for modernization cum expansion, bagasse based co-generation power projects, ethanol production from molasses, and conversion to zero liquid discharge plant.
National Electronic Funds Transfer (NEFT)
According to the RBI, NEFT system has registered a growth of 700% in terms of the volume of transactions from 2014-23.
- NEFT – Nation-wide centralized payment system owned and operated by RBI.
- Users – Individuals, firms and corporations can use the NEFT facility.
- Limits – No limit imposed by the RBI for funds transfer through NEFT.
- Outbound remittances through NEFT system – Permitted only to Nepal under the Indo-Nepal Remittance Facility (INRF) Scheme.
- Other Fund Transfer systems in India – Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) and Immediate Payment Service (IMPS).
Abu Dhabi Ministerial Declaration
13th Ministerial Conference (MC13) of WTO concluded with the adoption of Abu Dhabi Ministerial Declaration (ADMD)
- Abu Dhabi Ministerial Declaration – Regarding multilateral trading system, with WTO at its centre.
- Significance – Underlines the centrality of the development dimension in the work of the WTO to achieve the UN 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals.
- Other significant outcome of MC13 – WTO also agreed to further extend the moratorium on imposing import duties on e-commerce trade for 2 more years.
Google DeepMind’s Genie
Google DeepMind has just introduced Genie.
- Genie – A new model of AI that can generate interactive video games from just a text or image prompt.
- Developed by – Google DeepMind
- Significance –
- Enables anyone, even children, to dream up and step into generated worlds similar to human-designed simulated environments.
- Genie can be prompted to generate a diverse set of interactive and controllable environments although it is trained on video-only data.