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The Economic Times, By  Dipanjan Roy Chaudhury , Delhi, ET Bureau, Oct 24, 2017 India is considering a series of projects aimed at strengthening links with South Asia and between the region and Southeast Asia. This comes at a time when the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation is losing steam amid Pakistan's intransigence over connectivity pacts and China is seeking to increase its influence in the region.  The proposals under consideration include mega cross-border air and land connectivity projects, along with power and energy initiatives. Some of these projects were part of the agenda when external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj met her Bangladeshi counterpart Mahmud Ali in Dhaka on Sunday, officials told ET. These included proposals for Dhaka-Chennai-Colombo air connectivity, Chittagong Kolkata-Colombo shipping connectivity, Bangladesh-North Bengal rail link, Bangladesh Bhutan internet cables through India, trade route connecting Nakugao...

The Times of India, TNN, New Delhi, October 24,2017 The government is set to approve the biggest ever highway development plan to develop and expand approximately 83,000 km of roads at an investment of Rs 6.9 lakh crore by 2022 on Tuesday. The proposal on the Cabinet's agenda is aimed at pushing economic activity and generating at least 32 crore man days across the country in the next five years. The announcement will include the new 28,400 km Bharatmala highway programme connecting border areas, improving international, port and coastal connectivity besides improving highway corridors connecting key economic and commercial hubs besides at least 800 km of expressways. Sources said the focus of the entire plan is to improve speed of traffic flow on key corridors by providing uniform four-lane roads between two identified points. Most of these corridors will be shorter and access-controlled for faster movement of cargo vehicles. Due to poor road conditions, narrow wi...

 Business Standard, rediff.com, October 23, 2017 On a sequential basis, banks have had to set aside a substantial amount for bad loans, up 30 per cent from Rs 3,459 crore in the June quarter to Rs 4,508 crore. With banks’ earlier indications of their bad-loan situation being under control, the markets were expecting a stable asset quality profile for the September quarter. However, this has been hit by the Reserve Bank of India’s recent diktat in this regard. Gross NPAs for seven private banks which have declared their quarterly results so far rose 55 per cent over a year before to Rs35,772 crore by end-September. Compared to the June quarter, these were up 20 per cent. RBI told banks to reclassify some major loans as NPAs for FY17 and make provision. Two private lenders, Axis Bank and Lakshmi Vilas Bank, were hit significantly in the September quarter of 2017 by this directive. By the rule, if RBI’s assessment of bad debt numbers for a financial year ...

Business Line,  PTI, October 23, 2017 NEW DELHI, OCT 23:   The government’s rice procurement rose marginally to 69.89 lakh tonnes (LT) so far in the 2017–18 marketing year that started this month, compared to 69.31 LT in the year-ago, a senior Food Ministry official said. Food Corporation of India (FCI), the nodal agency for procurement and distribution, had procured 381 LT in the 2016–17 marketing season (October–September). For the current year, the government has fixed a higher rice procurement target at 375 LT on hopes of good production. “The arrival of paddy is picking up in mandis. Till last week, about 111 LT of paddy had arrived in Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh,” the official told PTI. FCI and state agencies, which normally buy in rice format, have procured 41.33 LT of the grain in Punjab and 28.56 LT in Haryana so far. The procurement in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand has just begun and will pick up pace in the coming days, the official said, ...

The Economic Times, PTI, October 23, 2017 As many as 331 infrastructure projects, each worth Rs 150 crore or above, have seen a cost overrun of Rs 1.72 lakh crore because of various reasons including delays, according to a government report Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation monitors infrastructure projects worth Rs 150 and above. The total original cost of implementing 1,257 projects was Rs 15,76,903.56 crore and their anticipated completion cost is likely to be Rs 17,49,274.62 crore, cost overrun of Rs 1,72,371.06 crore (10.93 per cent of the original), the ministry's flash report for July this year has stated. The expenditure incurred on these projects till July is Rs 6,80,016.96 crore, which is 38.87 per cent of the total anticipated cost. The 1,257 projects in question include 331 that reported cost overrun and 274 time escalation. "Out of a total of 1,257 projects, 2 projects have reported completion and 10 new projects have b...

The Telegraph, October 25, 2015 Capital market regulator Sebi's recent drive to rationalise mutual fund categories will have definite ramifications for investors who need to brace themselves for a period marked by scheme consolidations and, eventually, streamlining of their own portfolios. Before we move further, let's briefly recall the regulatory measure. The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) has recently created four principal categories for open-endes funds - equity, debt, hybrid and solutions-oriented. The rest has been marked as "others".The relevance of the initiative becomes evident when seen in the context of the diverse nature of funds and the wide variety of identities many of them currently bear. Within the mid-cap category, for instance, such diversity is very apparent, thanks to attempts by fund houses to position their mid-cap products in a variety of ways. This, in fact, may also be viewed in the backdrop of increase...

The Telegraph,  Saumitra Dasgupta,  The Chinese oil giants are getting ready to snap up indirect stakes in India's oil refineries. Last week, reports emerged that Chinese state-owned oil companies PetroChina and Sinopec had written to Aramco seeking to pick up a 5 per cent stake in the Saudi oil giant before it comes out with a global flotation of shares on the London and New York stock exchanges. The deal could provide reciprocal benefits to Aramco by permitting the Saudi company to invest in the Chinese refining industry as well. But Aramco has already been scouting for possible investments in India and has evinced interest in picking up stake in a 60-million-tonne refinery that India's state-owned refiners plan to establish on the west coast, which will rival Reliance Industries' 57 million-tonne-per-annum capacity at its two refineries in Jamnagar. Sinopec is a behemoth with revenues of over $267 billion and ranks third on the Fortune 500 Global li...

The Times Of India, TNN | Oct 23, 2017,  On June 29, 2014, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi in Mosul declared himself the leader of Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria, a theocratic state that was supposed to run according to Sharia law with al Baghdadi as the Caliph — the religious successor to Prophet Mohammad.  With the recent fall of Raqqa, the de facto capital of IS  , it seems that the regime of terror that attracted jihadists from across the world is over. This victory against IS followed the battle of Mosul — the largest city under its control from where it was driven out in July this year. How big was IS at its peak? According to the US department of defence, at its peak of territorial influence IS held between 1.07 lakh to 1.11 lakh sq km of land — mostly in northern Syria and northern and central Iraq. According to Rand Corporation, a US thinktank, IS territories had a population of over 11 million. By 2017, the territorial control fell to 4...

Indiatoday.in, Sanket Vijayasarathy, October 23, 2017 Companies like Samsung, Xiaomi and Apple in the past have had to deal with cases of exploding smartphones. But if a new report is true, it looks like Reliance Jio may also have a cause to worry as a new report has emerged claiming that a JioPhone unit exploded in Kashmir. As per a report by PhoneRadar, a JioPhone unit exploded with the back of the handset completely burnt and melted. While the report doesn't mention the name of the user to whom the JioPhone belonged to, it does note some information provided by LYF distributor who inspected the device. The report says that despite the burnt back, the battery of the unit was intact, and so was the front of the device. The report adds that if this was a case of faulty battery, it would have exploded too. The Lyf distributor told PhoneRadar that the battery of the unit was still functional. However, an image of the charging of the charging cable's burnt end sugg...

The Times of India, TNN | Oct 24, 2017, New Delhi In a shift of gears, the Modi government on Monday announced the  restart of a frozen political dialogue in Jammu & Kashmir  that will include the separatist Hurriyat conglomeration if its leaders are prepared for an engagement with the Centre. Home minister Rajnath Singh said  former Intelligence Bureau chief Dineshwar Sharma   will be the Centre's interlocutor and it will be left to him to decide whom to engage with — a formulation that puts the onus on separatists, some of who have been arrested by the NIA for alleged terror funding. The decision, though a departure from a security-led strategy, is seen to flow from PM Narendra Modi's August 15 speech where he hinted at dialogue by saying that the solution to the problems in J&K lay in embracing its people rather than bullets or abuse. The opposition was quick to claim that the government had backtracked with Congress leade...