• Virender Sehwag, Yuvraj Singh and Harbhajan Singh will be among a host of former stars in the India Maharaja team which will take part in the inaugural edition of the Legends League Cricket (LLC), starting on January 20 in Oman.

• The first season of LLC, which is a professional cricket league for retired international cricketers, will be played at the Al Amerat Cricket Stadium in Oman among three power-packed teams.

• The other two teams would be representing Asia and the rest of the world.

• Apart from the above trio, Irfan Pathan, Yusuf Pathan, Badrinath, RP Singh, Pragyan Ojha, Naman Ojha, Manpreet Gony, Hemang Badani, Venugopal Rao, Munaf Patel, Sanjay Bangar, Nayan Mongia and Amit Bhandari will also be part of the India Maharaja team.

• The Asia team called the Asia Lions includes former Pakistan and Sri Lankan legends Shoaib Akhtar, Shahid Afridi, Sanath Jayasuriya, Muttiah Muralitharan, Kamran Akmal, Chaminda Vaas, Romesh Kaluwitharana, Tillakaratne Dilshan, Azhar Mahmood, Upul Tharanga, Misbah-ul-Haq, Mohammed Hafeez, Shoaib Malik, Mohammed Yousuf and Umar Gul.

• Former Afghan skipper Asghar Afghan will also be a part of the team, while players representing the third team are yet to be announced.

• HDFC Life Insurance Company Ltd has completed the acquisition of Exide Life Insurance Company Limited on 1 January 2022 after it received all relevant regulatory approvals. 

• From 1 January, Exide Life will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of HDFC Life.

• HDFC Life Insurance has acquired Exide Life through a cash pay-out of Rs 726 crore and issuance of 8,70,22,222 equity shares at price of Rs 685 per share to Exide Industries Limited.

• Post-acquisition, Exide Industries now holds 4.1% stake in HDFC Life. 

• The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has paved the way for offline payments using any instrument like cards, wallets, mobile devices, etc. The banking regulator on Jan 3 released the framework for offline payment transactions.

• The framework sets an upper limit of Rs 200 per offline transaction.  The total limit for offline transactions on a payment instrument has been set at Rs 2,000 at any point in time.

• As per the new rules, offline payments can be made face-to-face only, and transactions can be done without Additional Factor of Authentication (AFA). However, replenishment of used limit can be allowed only in online mode with additional factor authentication.

• An offline payment is one where a transaction can be made without an internet or telecom connectivity. Offline payment can be enabled only after obtaining specific consent of the customer.

• Since the transactions are offline, alerts (by way of SMS and/or e-mail) will be received by the customer after a time lag.

• The offline payment framework, which comes into effect immediately, requires the issuer - banks or NBFCs -- to send transaction alerts to users as soon as transaction details are received.

• But it is not necessary to send alert for each transaction; however, details of each transaction should be adequately conveyed.

• The authorized payment system operators will have to incur all liabilities arising out of technical or transaction security issues at

           merchant’s end.

• The Railways earned Rs 403 crore from tatkal ticket charges, an additional Rs 119 crore from premium tatkal tickets, and Rs 511 crore from dynamic fares during 2020-21, even as much of its operations remained suspended through most of the year due to the Covid pandemic.

• Passengers in these three categories are usually last minute travellers who avail these services mostly for emergency travel by paying premium charges.

• In a reply to a RTI filed by Madhya Pradesh-based Chandra Shekhar Gaur, the Railways said that it earned Rs 240 crore from dynamic fares, Rs 353 crore from tatkal tickets and Rs 89 crore from premium tatkal charges in the financial year 2021-22 till September.

• The data from the railway ministry comes a month after a Parliamentary Standing Committee on Railways remarked that the charges levied on tatkal tickets are "a little unjustifiable" and put a huge burden particularly on those passengers who are financially weak and are forced to travel in urgency to meet their kith and kin or so for a very short distance also.

• Prime Minister Narendra Modi will visit Ferozepur in Punjab on Jan 5 and lay the foundation stones of development projects worth over Rs 42,750 crore, including the Delhi-Amritsar-Katra expressway and a PGI satellite centre , in the city.

• The projects also include four-laning of the Amritsar–Una section, Mukerian-Talwara broad gauge railway line and two new medical colleges at Kapurthala and Hoshiarpur  .
• Ahead of Modi's visit, the PMO said his consistent endeavour to improve connectivity across the country has led to multiple national highway development projects being taken up in Punjab.

•  It has resulted in more than doubling the total length of national highways in the state from about 1,700 kilometre in 2014 to more than 4,100 kilometres in 2021.

• The 669-km-long Delhi-Amritsar-Katra expressway will be developed at a cost of about Rs 39,500 crore, and it will halve the travel time from Delhi to Amritsar and Delhi to Katra .

• The greenfield expressway will connect key Sikh religious sites at Sultanpur Lodhi, Goindwal Sahib, Khadoor Sahib, Tarn Taran and the holy Hindu shrine of Vaishno Devi in Katra.

• The expressway will also connect key economic centres like Ambala Chandigarh, Mohali, Sangrur, Patiala, Ludhiana, Jalandhar, Kapurthala, Kathua and Samba in Haryana, Chandigarh, Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir.

• The four-laning of Amritsar–Una section will be done at the cost of around 1,700 crore.

• The 77-km-long section is part of the larger Amritsar to Bhota corridor spanning across the longitudinal expanse of northern Punjab and Himachal Pradesh, connecting four major national highways, namely Amritsar-Bhatinda-Jamnagar economic corridor, Delhi-Amritsar-Katra expressway, North-South corridor and Kangra-Hamirpur-Bilaspur-Shimla corridor.

• It will help in improving the connectivity of religious sites at Ghoman, Shri Hargobindpur and Pulpukta Town (home to the famous Gurudwara Pulpukta Sahib) .

• He will also lay the foundation stone of a new broad gauge railway line between Mukerian and Talwara of around 27 km in length, to be built at a cost of over Rs 410 crore.

• New medical infrastructure projects in three towns of Punjab will be laid. The 100 bedded PGI satellite centre at Ferozepur will be built at a cost of more than Rs 490 crore.

• Two medical colleges at Kapurthala and Hoshiarpur will be developed at a cost of around Rs 325 crore each and with a capacity of about 100 seats.

• These colleges have been approved in Phase-III of the centrally sponsored scheme "establishment of new medical colleges attached with district/referral hospitals" .

• A major controversy broke out over using vials of Covaxin, which had originally expired, but are being used with "revised" expiry dates, for 15-17-year-olds whose Covid vaccination began on Jan 3  , forcing the Centre to issue a clarification.

• For now, Covaxin by Bharat Biotech is the only vaccine being used for the adolescent age group in India , nearly 3.78 lakh vaccinations had been carried out among 15–17-year-olds within hours of inoculation starting for them.

• Several people took to social media on Jan 3   to claim that their teenage kids were being administered Covaxin doses from vials which were showing expiry dates of previous weeks but hospitals, in separate sheets, were showing them "revised" expiry dates.

• To these accusations, the Union health ministry said this was "false and misleading and based on incomplete information".

• The Central Drugs Standard Control Organization, had on October 25 last year, in response to an application by Bharat Biotech, approved the extension of shelf life of Covaxin from nine months to 12 months.

• Similarly, the shelf life of Covishield had been extended by the national regulator from 6 months to 9 months in February last year.

• Just six days after joining the BJP, Punjab MLA Balwinder Singh Laddi has parted ways with the saffron party and rejoined the Congress.

• The US-led coalition against the Islamic State group in Iraq on Jan 3   shot down two armed drones targeting a compound at Baghdad airport hosting its personnel.

• The incident, which was not claimed by any group, came two years after a US drone strike near the airport killed Iran's revered General Qassem Soleimani and his Iraqi lieutenant.

• January 3, 2020, US strike killed Soleimani, who headed the Quds Force, the foreign operations arm of Iran's Revolutionary Guards and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy leader of the Hashed al-Shaabi coalition of armed groups.