- Union Minister Ram Vilas Paswan said that the ‘one nation, one ration card’ facility has been started in 12 states in the country on the first day of the New Year.
- Concerned over exit of a few states, dropping out of insurance companies and growing dissent among farmers on the government’s flagship crop insurance scheme, the centre has set up a seven-member group of ministers (GoM) headed by defence minister Rajnath Singh to review the scheme and recommend changes to make it more farmer friendly.
- The government has created a Department of Military Affairs, to be headed by newly appointed Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) Gen Bipin Rawat.
- The Ministry of Railway has accorded Organised Group ‘A’ status to Railway Protection Force (RPF) and renamed it Indian Railway Protection Force Service.
- As a part of Odisha’s ‘5T initiatives’, the state government launched e-Gazette Portal, an online platform to digitalize the publication of Odisha Gazette and move forward as a paperless mode of publication.
- The Delhi government announced that Pragati Maidan metro station will be rechristened as the Supreme Court metro station.
- Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi dedicated to the nation 5 Young Scientists Laboratories of Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), in Bengaluru.
- Visakhapatnam will host the prestigious three-day 14th Global Healthcare Summit from January 3, 2021.
- The government kept the interest rates on small savings schemes, including NSC and PPF, unchanged for the fourth quarter of 2019-20 despite moderating bank deposit rates. Interest rates for small savings schemes are notified on a quarterly basis.
- The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Shaktikanta Das launched a mobile application called ‘Mobile Aided Note Identifier’ (MANI) to aid visually challenged persons in identifying the denomination of currency notes.
- India’s current account deficit (CAD) narrowed to 0.9 per cent of GDP, or USD 6.3 billion, in the September 2019 quarter, on account of lower trade deficit.
- HexGn released a study of the funding trends in the global start-up ecosystem in 2019; the team analyzed over 60,000 deals and one million data points for the report.
