PERSONS APRIL 2015

PERSONS APRIL 2015

• Neetu Agarwal: The Kurnool police arrested Telugu film actor Neetu Agarwal on 26th April for alleged involvement in smuggling of red sanders. She was arrested at the Ullindakonda crossroads in Kurnool district, while she was travelling in a car to Bengaluru.
  
• Nazarbayev: Energy-rich Kazakhstan's incumbent President Nursultan Nazarbayev scored a crushing victory in one-sided presidential ballot, taking 97.5 percent of the vote to win a fifth consecutive term. Kazakhstan's Central Election Commission claimed a record voter turnout of 95.11 percent for the poll.
  Nazarbayev has ruled the vast Central Asian country since before the breakup of the USSR in 1991.His new five-year term will take him to three decades as leader.
  
• Rajarajeshwari: Raja Rajeswari has been sworn-in as a criminal court judge here by Mayor Bill de Blasio, becoming the first India-born woman to be appointed a judge in the New York City.
  Rajeswari, 43, who had immigrated to the US from India as a teenager, previously worked with the Richmond County District Attorney's Office for her entire career in several bureaus including Criminal Court, Narcotics, Supreme Court, and the Sex Crimes Special Victims Bureau, where she last served as Deputy Chief.
  
• KD Tripathi: Kapil Dev Tripathi, a 1980 batch officer from the Assam-Meghalaya cadre, has been appointed Secretary in the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas.
  Tripathi’s name was approved by the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet. Tripathi succeeds Saurabh Chandra. Prior to this, Tripathi was Secretary in the Department of Public Enterprises at the Ministry of Heavy Industries. He has held senior positions in both Central and State governments. Tripathi was also a Secretary in the Central Vigilance Commission.
  
• Nasim Zaidi: Nasim Zaidi has taken over as the Chief Election Commissioner of India on 19th April. He succeeded HS Brahma, who retired as the Chief Election Commissioner on 18th April. Zaidi will be the sole member of the three-member Election Commission, which has two vacant posts of Election Commissioners. Zaidi will have a tenure up to July, 2017. He is a 1976 batch IAS officer from Uttar Pradesh cadre.
  
• Sitaram Yechury: The Communist Party of India (Marxist) elected senior politburo member SitaramYechury as the new General Secretary replacing Prakash Karat who has completed his three terms as the Party General Secretary. The official decision of the leadership change in the CPI (M) was taken on the last day of the six-day party congress meet held in Visakhapatnam.
  
• Janaki Ballabh Patnaik: Three-time Chief Minister of Odisha and senior Congress leader Janaki Ballabh Patnaik passed away in Tirupati of Andhra Pradesh.
  
  J B Patnaik was born on 3rd January, 1927. He first became chief minister of Odisha in 1980 and was in power till 1989. He returned for a four-year stint in 1995. He held the post of chief minister of Odisha for the longest time on record before the incumbent Naveen Patnaik.
  
  He was also Governor of Assam from 2009 to 2014 besides being in the Union Cabinet of Indira Gandhi.
  
  Mr. Patnaik passed out with a bachelor degree in Sanskrit from the Utkal University of Odisha in 1947 and secured an MA degree in Political Science from the Banaras Hindu University in 1949. He had written a number of books on religion and literature which had won thousands of hearts.
  
• Ravi Narain: The RBI has appointed Ravi Narain, Vice-Chairman, National Stock Exchange of India Limited, as a member of the External Advisory Committee (EAC) for evaluating applications of Small Finance Banks, in place of MS Sahoo, as the latter rescued himself from the Committee following his appointment in the Competition Commission of India.
  
• Historian Christopher Bayly:Christopher Alan Bayly, an eminent historian and teacher, whose work on colonial and post-colonial India has made a lasting imprint on the way India’s past has been understood, died in Chicago on April 20.
  
  Much of Professor Bayly’s work was on 18th and 19th century India and on the transformation that colonialism wrought on pre-modern societies and structures. He argued that Indian society, particularly its local structures, institutions and networks, had far greater resilience and dynamism in withstanding the onslaught of British colonialism than what existing scholarship held was the case.
  
  His early books — like The Local Roots of Indian Politics: Allahabad 1880-1920(1975);and Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (1988) — soon became essential reading for history syllabi in undergraduate and post-graduate courses. Professor Bayly was knighted in 2007 for his contribution to historical scholarship.
  
• Vivek Murthy: Indian-American Vivek Murthy was sworn-in as the US Surgeon General by Vice President Joe Biden at a ceremony held at Fort Myer in Virginia. Murthy has become the youngest-ever in-charge of the country's public health. He is now the highest ranking Indian-American in the Obama Administration.
  
• Guenter Grass: German Nobel laureate Guenter Grass died at Berlin on 13th April. Grass made his literary reputation with "The Tin Drum," published in 1959. Three decades after its release, in 1999, the Swedish Academy honored Grass with the Nobel Prize for literature, praising him for setting out to revive German literature after the Nazi era. Guenter Grass is considered to have given a voice to the generation that came of age during the horrors of the Nazi era.
  
• Modi: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal have been voted among the 100 most influential people in the world in a poll conducted by the prestigious Time magazine.
  
  Modi, who became prime minister following a landslide electoral victory, last year, polled 0.6 per cent of the votes in this year's Time 100 readers’ poll.
  
  Kejriwal, who staged a political comeback, winning the Delhi elections earlier this year with an overwhelming mandate, got 0.5 percent of the votes cast by the readers of the magazine.
  
  The Time 100 is an annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world, spanning politics, entertainment, business, technology, science, religion and other fields. Chosen by the editors of the magazine, voting for the readers' poll closed on April 10. More than half of the votes, or 57.38 percent, were cast within the US. Canada and Britain followed with 5.54 percent and 4.55 percent, respectively.
  
• Shamina Singh: President Barack Obama has named yet another Indian-American as member of the Board of Directors of the Corporation for National and Community Service for a term expiring in October 2019. The nomination of Shamina Singh, executive director of the MasterCard Centre for Inclusive Growth since December 2013, has been sent to the Senate, according to a White House announced
  
  She joined MasterCard in 2013 as the global director for government services and solutions where she expanded MasterCard's business capabilities to digitise social subsidy programmes in over 40 countries. Prior to joining MasterCard, Shamina led government and public affairs for Nike and spent five years with Citigroup's Global Community Development Group.
  
  Over the course of 15 years in the public sector, she held senior positions within the Clinton Administration and the US House of Representatives.
  
  She is a Young Global Leader and Member of the Global Agenda Council on India with the World Economic Forum, a Henry Crown Fellow with the Aspen Institute and served on the Presidential Advisory Commission on Military Leadership Diversity. In 2003, she served as a senior advisor to US House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and in 2002 was the deputy campaign manager for the Ron Kirk for US Senate campaign.
  
  Shamina Singh was executive director for the President's Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders from 1999 to 2001.
  
• Vivek Priyadarshi: The Supreme Court appointed CBI SP Vivek Priyadarshi to head a new investigating team to further probe the IPL-6 spot-fixing and betting scandal. A bench comprising Justices T S Thakur and F M I Kalifulla said the CBI officer would be at liberty to choose his team of officials for assistance in probing the scandal further.
  
  Priyadarshi will replace B B Mishra as the head of the probe team following his retirement. Earlier, he was recommended by the apex court appointed three-member committee of retired judges headed by former Chief Justice of India R M Lodha. The committee has been entrusted the job of further investigating the IPL-6 scandal.
  
  The committee was tasked to investigate allegations against Sundar Raman ,Gurunath Meiyappan, Raj Kundra and their respective franchises, and also to examine and make suitable recommendations to the BCCI for such reforms.
  
• V Saritha: Delhi transport Minister Gopal Rai today inducted 30 year-old V Saritha as the first women driver of the Delhi Transport Corporation. Saritha belongs to Telangana.
  
• Stanislav Gross: Former Czech prime minister Stanislav Gross, who became the country's youngest ever premier more than a decade ago, has died at the age of 45 after a long illness.
  
  Gross served as interior minister in two governments, including under Milos Zeman, who is now president, and then became prime minister in July 2004 at the age of 34, leading a Social Democrat government. Less than a year later, he left office amid a scandal over the source of funds he used to buy a Prague apartment.
  
• Jamal Benomar: The UN peace envoy to Yemen, Jamal Benomar, has resigned. The Moroccan diplomat had been UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s special envoy for Yemen since 2012.
  
• Mohan Kumar: Mohan Kumar, presently Ambassador of India to Bahrain, has been appointed as the next Ambassador of India to France.
  
• Surya Bahadur Thapa: Former Nepal Prime Minister Surya Bahadur Thapa passed. Thapa served as Prime Minister of Nepal for five terms under three different Kings in a political career spanning more than 50 years.
  
  In 1966, he was appointed Prime Minister under the modified constitution of Nepal. He was responsible for expanding the coverage of the Constitution of 1962 and promulgated 2nd amendment to make it “people-oriented”. In 1994 mid-term election, Mr. Thapa was democratically elected to the House of Representatives from his home town.
  
  Elected Prime Minister of Nepal for the third time by the House of Representatives, Mr. Thapa led a coalition government in October 1997.
  
• Meenakshi Madan Rai: Meenakshi Madan Rai was sworn in as the first lady judge of the Sikkim High Court. Governor of Sikkim Srinivas Patil administered the oath of office to her at Raj Bhavan in Gangtok. After taking oath of office, she took charge as judge. With this Sikkim High Court again got its full strength of three judges after a gap of about one year.
  
  It should be noted that Mrs. Rai is also the third High Court judge who hails from Sikkim.
  
  Sikkim High Court Established:1975, under Article 371-F which was added in Constitution by Constitutional (Thirty-Sixth Amendment) Act, 1975.
  
• Annadurai: Annadurai, senior scientist and programme director, Indian Remote Sensing Satellites (IRS) and Small Satellite Systems (SSS) of ISRO Satellite Centre (ISAC), Bengaluru, has assumed office as Director of ISAC on April 1. He took over as Director, ISAC from SK Shivakumar, who superannuated on March 31, 2015.
  
• Pratap Singh: Pratap Singh, 15, an Indian-origin schoolboy in the U.K has been awarded the Institute of Physics Prize for conducting an experiment that verified an effect of Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity. More than 200 UK students aged 11-18 competed in the finals, demonstrating their projects to thousands of visitors.
  
• Ramalinga Raju: Six years after the biggest accounting fraud shook the corporate world in India, Satyam founder B Ramalinga Raju was sentenced to 7 years in jail and was fined Rs 5 crore by a special court in Hyderabad. The court had pronounced all the 10 people guilty in one of the biggest corporate scandals involving an Indian company.
  
  Besides Ramalinga Raju, who was the founder-chairman of the company, the other accused are, his brother and Satyam's former Managing Director B Rama Raju, former chief financial officer Vadlamani Srinivas, former PwC auditors Subramani Gopalakrishnan and T Srinivas, Raju's another brother B Suryanarayana Raju, former employees G Ramakrishna, D Venkatpathi Raju and Ch Srisailam and Satyam's former internal chief auditor VS Prabhakar Gupta.
  
  The case had rocked India Inc and led to a massive upheaval in the software and Information Technology Enabled Service (ITES) industry in the country. The case was investigated by the Central Bureau of Investigation.
  
  The Satyam story began unravelling on December 16, 2008, when the company made an aborted attempt to buy Maytas Infra and Maytas Properties, floated by Raju's kin, for $1.6 billion.
  
  Raju confessed to the accounting fraud on January 7, 2009.B Ramalinga Raju, one of the pioneers in the industry had confessed to manipulating his company's account books and inflating profits over many years to the tune of crores of rupees.
  
• Quamaruzzaman: In Bangladesh, top Jamaat-e-Islami leader Muhammad Qamaruzzaman was hanged for committing war crimes and mass killings during the country's 1971 independence war against Pakistan. Bangladesh's International Crimes Tribunal, in May 2013, sentenced Quamaruzzaman to death. He was found guilty of mass killings, murder, abduction, torture, rape, and abetment of torture in central Mymensingh region.
  
• Bharat Hari Singhania: Bharat Hari Singhania assumed the presidency of JK Organization. The company issued a formal statement on 9 April 2015 in this regard. The JK Group is 125-year-old and has footprint in 100 countries. It has overseas manufacturing operations in Indonesia, Mexico, Romania, Belgium, Portugal and the UAE.
  
• Atul Keshap:President Barack Obama has nominated an Indian-American, a former official at its Embassy in New Delhi, as the next US ambassador to Sri Lanka and Maldives.
  
  Keshap is currently serving as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in South and Central Asian Affairs Bureau of the State Department.
  
  As his current role, Keshap had worked closely with Assistant Secretary of State Nisha Desai Biswal to coordinate US policy toward India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Maldives, and Bhutan, comprising a diverse and strategic region of almost 1.5 billion people and over USD 2 trillion in economic output.
  
  Previously, he served at the Department of State as a US Senior Official for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation in the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs from 2012 to 2013.
  
  From 2010 to 2012, he was the Director for India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Maldives in the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs.
  
  Prior to that, Keshap was Director for United Nations Human Rights in the Bureau of International Organization Affairs from 2008 to 2010 and Deputy Political Counselor at the US Embassy in New Delhi from 2005 to 2008. He had also served as Director for Near Eastern and North African Affairs in the National Security Council from 2003 to 2004 and as Special Assistant to the Under Secretary for Political Affairs from 2002 to 2003.
  
• Sahoo: Former SEBI Wholetime Member MS Sahoo has joined the Competition Commission of India as a Wholetime Member. Sahoo was till recently Secretary at the Company Secretaries’ Institute. The other serving Members of the Competition watchdog are SL Bunker, Sudhir Mital, Augustine Peter and UC Nahta.
  
• Ana Jara: Peruvian Prime Minister Ana Jara was forced to step down after losing a vote of confidence in Congress on 30th April. Ms Jara was censured over allegations that Peru's intelligence agency had for years gathered information on leading figures in business and politics.
  
  President Ollanta Humala must now select a new Prime Minister and Cabinet. It is considered the biggest crisis of his Presidency since he took office in July 2011.
  
  In Peru, the President is the head of the executive, but analysts say having his number two deposed by the opposition-dominated Congress is a sign of his waning influence. A recent opinion poll by Ipsos suggested Mr Humala's popularity rating had dropped to 25 per cent.
  
  It is the first time in half a century that Peru's Congress has deposed a Prime Minister. Congress voted 72 to 42 to censure Ms Jara, with two abstentions.
  
• ShabbirAli: Telangana Senior Congress leader Mohammed Ali Shabbir has been appointed as the Leader of Opposition in the Telangana State Legislative Council.
  
• Klaus Tschira: Klaus Tschira, one of the co-founders of European software giant SAP, has died. Tschira, a trained physicist, left IBM to found SAP in 1972 together with four IBM colleagues: Hasso Plattner, who is still the company's chairman, Dietmar Hopp, Hans-Werner Hector and Claus Wellenreuther.
  
  The German business software company began by developing software that could process data in real time rather than overnight in batches, and went public in 1988.
  
  It is now Europe's biggest technology company, with revenue of 17.6 billion euros ($18.9 billion), market capitalization of 82.3 billion euros and more than 74,000 employees in 2014. Tschira, a billionaire, stepped down from SAP's supervisory board in 2007