DAILY GK UPDATE

1.    Voting in 7 high-voltage LS seats in Delhi on Thursday

i. The stage is now set for the first substantial round of polling in the Lok Sabha elections on Thursday involving nearly 11 crore voters in 92 seats spread across 11 states, including Delhi and the national capital region and the riot-hit Muzaffarnagar.

ii. This will be the third round in the nine-phased elections which began on April 7 and will conclude on May 12. Thursday’s round will also cover three Union Territories.

iii. Lok Sabha Speaker Meria Kumar, seven union ministers including Kapil Sibal, Kamal Nath, Shashi Tharoor (all of Congress), Ajit Singh of RLD and former army chief V.K. Singh and Harsh Vardhan (both BJP) are the key nominees among the 1418 candidates in the fray in tomorrow’s round.

iv. Ten of the 80 constituencies in politically key Uttar Pradesh will go to polls on Thursday and they include communally-sensitive and riot-hit Muzaffarnagar, Saharanpur, Kairana, Aligarh, Bijnor, Meerut, Baghpat, Ghaziabad, Gautambudh Nagar and Bulandshahar.

v. Altogether 98 candidates, including Congress stalwarts and former chief ministers Giridhar Gamang and Hemanand Biswal, former union ministers Jual Oram (BJP) and Bhakta Charan Das (Congress) are in the race for the ten LS seats while Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik is among the assembly candidates in fray on Thursday.

2.    India’s GDP growth likely to rise to 5.4% in 2014: IMF

i. India’s growth is expected to improve in 2014, the International Monetary Fund said on Tuesday.

ii. “India’s growth is expected to recover from 4.4 per cent in 2013 to 5.4 per cent in 2014, supported by slightly stronger global growth, improving export competitiveness and implementation of recently approved investment projects,” the latest edition of the World Economic Outlook released by the IMF said.

iii. Overall growth is expected to firm up on policies supporting investment and a confidence boost from recent policy actions, but will remain below trend, it added.

iv. “Consumer price inflation is expected to remain an important challenge, but should continue to move onto a downward trajectory,” the IMF report said.

v. The outlook also estimated that India’s growth rate would increase to 6.4 per cent in 2015. In 2012, India’s growth rate stood at 4.7 per cent.

3.    Active India Facebook users cross 100 mn, largest outside US

i. Social media giant Facebook has crossed 100 million active users in India, its largest base outside the US.

ii. "Today, we have more than 100 million people who access Facebook actively in India each month," Facebook India Head of Growth & Mobile Partnerships Kevin D'Souza told

iii. On the outlook, D'Souza said: "We recently announced Internet.Org, a global partnership with the goal of connecting the next 5 billion people around the world, to make the same access and opportunity available to everyone."

iv. According to Facebook, 84 million of its 100 million users in India access the social networking site from their mobile devices.

v. Facebook saw its global daily active users (DAUs) rise by 22 per cent to 757 million during December from 618 million in the year-ago period, helped by growth in major markets, including Brazil, India and the US.