04 May 2016 Current Affairs
Portal For Contract Labour Payment Management
System Launched
Piyush Goyal, Minister of State (IC) for Power, Coal and New &
Renewable Energy on 4 May launched ‘Contract Labour Payment Management System’-
a portal of Coal India Limited (CIL). This web portal will help the government
to curb problems like corruption and exploitation of contractual workers by
contractors. It will also help in providing proper and timely wages to contractual
workers. It has been planned to make payment to the contractors only after
submitting a system generated declaration of compliance. The Contract Labour
Payment Management System web portal is created for monitoring compliance of
labour payment and other benefits to the contract workers under the Contract
Labour (Regulation & Abolition) Act. 1970. It is an integrated system for
all subsidiaries of CIL. The in-house developed application will maintain a
comprehensive database of all contract workers engaged by different contractors
in CIL and all its subsidiaries. Central Mine Planning and Development
Institute (CMPDI) the Ranchi based consultancy subsidiary of Coal India Limited
shall maintain the portal.
Anti-Hijacking Bill, 2014 Passed in Rajya
Sabha
The Rajya Sabha on 4 May 2016 passed the Anti-Hijacking Bill,
2014, which provides for the death penalty even if ground handling staff and
airport personnel are killed during such acts. In the earlier Bill, hijackers
could be tried for the death penalty only in the event of death of hostages,
such as flight crew, passengers and security personnel. Besides broadening the
definition of hijacking, it also provides for an enhanced punishment to the
perpetrators as well as the area of jurisdiction.
Gravitational Wave Scientists Won Special
Breakthrough Prize
The scientists and engineers of the Laser Interferometer
Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Scientific Collaboration, who detected
gravitational waves and reported their discovery in February 2015, have been
awarded a $3 million Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. The
prize will be shared between two groups of laureates : the three founders of
the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), who will each
equally share $1 million; and 1,012 contributors to the experiment, who will
each equally share $2 million. The three founders are Rainer Weiss, emeritus
professor of physics at MIT; Kip Thorne, Caltech’s Richard P. Feynman Professor
of Theoretical Physics, emeritus; and Ronald Drever, emeritus professor of
physics at Caltech.
Scientists Developed World’s Smallest Light
Powered Engine
A group of researchers from University of Cambridge have built the
world’s smallest (nanoscale) working engine. The research team was led by
Professor Jeremy Baumberg from the Cavendish Laboratory. They have named the
microscopic engine as ANTs (Actuating Nano-Transducers). The nanoscale engine
is just a few billionths of a metre in size and uses light to power itself. The
prototype engine was made of tiny charged particles of gold. It was bound
together with temperature-responsive gel-like polymer called pNIPAM.
