News in Short

• Indian energy tycoon Mukesh Ambani is no longer Asia’s richest man, relinquishing the title to Jack Ma after oil prices collapsed along with global stocks.
• Ma, the Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. founder who relinquished the No. 1 ranking in mid-2018, is back on top with a $44.5 billion fortune, about $2.6 billion more than Ambani.
• This raises questions about whether Ambani’s flagship Reliance Industries Ltd. will be able to cut net debt to zero by early 2021, as he has pledged.

• Indian mountaineer Bhawna Dehariya has successfully scaled Mount Kosciuszko, the highest mountain peak in Australia.
• Ms. Dehariya, who last year scaled Mount Everest, successfully summit the 2,228-metres Mount Kosciuszko on Monday.
• Dehariya had scaled Mount Kilimanjaro on the occasion of Diwali on November 27, last year.

• Senior Congress leader Jyotiraditya Scindiatendered his resignation from the party, stating its time for a need to move on.
• The development comes a day after Congress MLAs loyal to Scindia indicated that they may pull out from the Kamal Nath-led government.
• Scindia's exit puts the 15-month-old Congress government in MP on the verge of a collapse. Of the 230 seats in the MP assembly, 120 were held by the ruling combine of Congress and minor parties, 107 by the BJP and two were vacant.

• As part of proactive measures against the spread of novel coronavirus (COVID-19) infection, all station house officers in the Kochi city police have been asked to take action against those found spitting or blowing nose in public under Section 120(E) of the Kerala Police Act.
• The Kerala police have made it clear that the failure to inform the Health Department by those who had travelled to coronavirus-affected countries will be treated as an offence.
• The Health Department had said that those who had travelled to countries where COVID-19 cases had been reported should not participate in any public event, festival or mass prayers in the State

• A pair of computer-programmed machines developed by Asimov Roboticsdistributes masks, sanitiser and napkins in a bid to check COVID-19 while the other screens detail about the World Health Organisations (WHO) campaign to contain the disease.
• Public apathy towards preventive measures against coronavirus has prompted the solutions-provider company to go for such a drive. The use of robots in the campaign has invited public attention, considering the propensity of coronavirus to spread though human contact.
• The KSUM is a nodal agency of the Kerala government for entrepreneurship development and incubation activities in the state.