News in Short

• The JMM-Congress-RJD alliance registered a landslide victory bagging 47 seats in the 81-member Jharkhand Assembly and will be in line to form the next government.
• Hemant Soren, who is the leader of JMM is expected to be sworn in as the chief minister of the state.
• Several ministers including incumbent chief minister Raghubar Das lost the elections for the assembly.

• Road injury was the leading cause of death in India among 15-39-year-old males in 2017 and was the second leading cause for both sexes combined, according to the findings of India State-Level Disease Burden Initiative.
• The study is the first comprehensive population-level estimates of road injury deaths by type of road users in each State of India.
• The study notes that if the estimated trends of road injury deaths up to 2017 were to continue, none of the Indian States are likely to meet the SDG 2020 target of reducing the road injury deaths by half from 2015 to 2020 or even by 2030.

• Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg has resigned, following a year of intense scrutiny and industrial setbacks due to failure of 737 MAX jetliner.
• Chairman David Calhoun will serve as CEO and president, effective Jan. 13.

• The government has named Harsh Vardhan Shringla, currently serving as India’s ambassador to the US, as the next foreign secretary.
• Shringla, belongs to the 1984 batch of the civil services and is likely to take over soon after Republic Day, 2020.
• Shringla will take over from the incumbent, Vijay Gokhale, an expert on China and East Asia.

• The IMF has said that India is now in the midst of a significant economic slowdown and has urged the government to take urgent policy actions to address the current prolonged downturn.
• The IMF noted that India’s rapid economic expansion in recent years has lifted millions of people out of poverty. However, in the first half of 2019, a combination of factors led to subdued economic growth in India.
• The IMF attributed this to the abrupt reduction in non-bank financial companies’ (NBFC) credit expansion and the associated broad-based tightening of credit conditions appears to be an important factor and weak income growth, especially rural, has been affecting private consumption.