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Liv emint  May 02, 2018 In a major boost to expansion of health care infrastructure in the country, the Union Cabinet on Wednesday approved the continuation of the Pradhan Mantri Swasthya Suraksha Yojana (PMSSY) beyond 12th Five Year Plan to 2019-20. The PMSSY, which is a central sector scheme, aims at correcting the imbalances in the availability of affordable tertiary health care facilities in different parts of the country in general, and augmenting facilities for quality medical education in the under-served states in particular. The financial outlay for this purpose is Rs14,832 crore. Under this scheme, new All India Institute of Medical Science (AIIMS) are established and the government medical colleges are upgraded, an official statement said. Expressing gratitude to the prime minister, Union health minister J.P. Nadda said setting up of new AIIMS would not only transform health education and training, but also address the shortfall of health care profess...

Business Line  May 02, 2018 The Centre has taken the first step towards privatisation of poppy cultivation and extraction of narcotic raw materials. It has awarded a licence to Rusan Pharma for the trial cultivation of poppy and extraction of opium from it through a new technology that improves the crop yield. Opium is the source of alkaloids such as morphine, codeine and the baine, used in anti-addiction therapies and medicines that treat extreme pain, such as in cancer patients. Rusan Pharma Managing Director Kunal Saxena told BusinessLine that the company has been awarded a two-year pilot project through an open tender. Rusan fit the bill in terms of bringing in quality seeds, use of new technology to extract opium, and developing the extracts into medicines, he added. Did you know? Over 10 years, the cultivated area under poppy in India has declined, for various reasons, from 26,000 hectares to 5,800 hectares From 1.60 lakh farmers 10 years ago, the ...

Business Line May 02, 2018 The Centre has decided to merge 11 different government agricultural schemes, including the horticulture mission and the National Food Security Mission, into an umbrella scheme called Green Revolution–Krishonnati Yojana (GRKY) for better coordination and fine-tuning. The umbrella scheme, extended beyond the 12th Five-Year plan to 2019-20, will have a Central share of ₹33,270 crore, Union Minister for Law and Justice Ravi Shankar Prasad, said briefing the media after the Cabinet meeting. “The schemes will be continued with an expenditure of ₹33,269 crore for three financial years till 2019-20,” he said. The schemes and missions that are brought under the GRKY include the national mission for sustainable agriculture, national mission on oilseeds and oil palm, integrated schemes for agricultural marketing, agricultural census and economics and agricultural cooperation and several sub-missions such as those on agriculture extension, seeds and pla...

The Telegraph May 03, 2018 Hackers appear to have stolen data from the Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO), which manages over Rs 8.5 lakh crore in pension funds, by burrowing through an Aadhaar seeding platform. The EPFO tried to play down the seriousness of the data hack by suggesting that the data busters hadn't managed to break into its servers but had exploited certain vulnerabilities in a gateway which is managed by CSC E-Governance Services Ltd, the Aadhaar seeding platform. The web portal that was hacked allowed EPFO field offices and CSC centres to seed Aadhaar with the Provident Fund's universal account number (UAN) allocated to employees. Seeding is the process by which Aadhaar numbers are included in the service delivery database of service providers. The EPFO said it had shut down the website on March 22 and asked CSC to secure the confidential data of employees and plug vulnerabilities. On Wednesday night, the EPFO was allowing its...

The Indian Express May 03, 2018 Vedanta Cairn, operator of the Barmer field in Rajasthan, bid aggressively, while eight other companies, including state-run ONGC, Oil India, Indian Oil and GAIL (India) also put in their bids for the 55 hydrocarbon blocks offered under the Open Acreage Licensing Policy (OALP), a critical part of the March 2016-launched Hydrocarbon Exploration Licensing Policy (HELP). HELP’s hallmarks are single licence for exploration of all forms of hydrocarbons (including shale gas and coal bed methane), a simple revenue-sharing model and marketing and pricing freedom for the developers. Officials claimed the level of interest shown by bidders “far exceeded expectations”, but the absence of a single foreign oil giant was conspicuous. Reliance Industries stayed away as well. State-owned ONGC bid for 37 blocks while Vedanta Cairn put in bids for all the 55 areas on offer. As many as 110 bids had been received, the Directorate General of Hydrocarbon (DGH)...

The Print May 03, 2018 The Modi government has tasked NITI Aayog to play peacemaker in the GM controversy amid opposing viewpoints on the use of this technology to boost farm productivity, ThePrint has learnt. The idea is to bring supporters and opponents into the same room and sort their differences out, sources said. This includes groups such as the Bharatiya Kisan Sangh, an RSS affiliate, which has been leading the opposition to GM technology. The invitees also include farm experts such as Kapil Bhai Saha who is opposed to GM and scientists such as Dr K.C. Bansal and Dr Deepak Pental who support GM. A first meeting scheduled for 26 April was cancelled at the last moment as NITI Aayog vice-chairman Rajiv Kumar was not available. A new date is yet to be set. “GM technology is the need of the hour. One can’t wish it away,” one of the invitees to the meeting told ThePrint, speaking on condition of anonymity. “But unfortunately there are so many misgivings abo...

The Indian Express May 03, 2018 India and China held their first ever “informal summit” in the central Chinese city of Wuhan on April 27 and 28. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping met on as many as four occasions in a one-to-one format and in two other restricted meetings. This is unprecedented and unusual and, therefore, significant. It reflects the singular dominance of Xi as China’s top leader, but Modi is cast in a similar mould. Xi is clearly the chief architect of China’s external relations. Modi has a strong belief in the value of personal diplomacy and leader-to-leader engagement. There is a mutual recognition that each has the stature to reorient the India-China relationship in a new direction. Since the two leaders must have spoken to each other for several hours, even allowing for interpretation, their agenda must have been extraordinarily broad. While the official word on the talks has been that the leaders did not go into specifics bu...

The Hindu May 03, 2018 What is the RBI’s stance? In the most direct action taken so far by regulatory authorities on the issue of cryptocurrencies, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), during its monetary policy announcement on April 6, directed all regulated agencies, including banks, to stop doing any business with “any person or entity dealing with or settling virtual currencies (VC)”. What does this mean? The circular says that banks have to stop all services to those dealing in VCs, including maintaining accounts, registering, trading, settling, clearing, giving loans against virtual tokens, accepting them as collateral, opening accounts of exchanges dealing with them and transfer/receipt of money in accounts relating to the purchase or sale of VCs. In addition, the RBI gave its regulated entities three months from the date of the circular to exit any such relationship they might already be in. Why did this happen? This decision did not come out of the blue...

First Post  May 01, 2018 Tral is fast emerging as the new address in India of the Masood Azhar-led and Pakistan-based militant outfit Jaish-e-Mohammed. It has recently been in the national news as it is the hometown of Burhan Muzaffar Wani, who infused a fresh lease of life in the three-decade-old insurgency in Kashmir. On 24 April, the Jammu and Kashmir police killed four militants in the Laam forest of Tral, which is located in the volatile Pulwama district. Two days later, the police identified one of the slain militant as Mufti Yasir, the operational commander of Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) who was at one time the personal security officer of Masood Azhar. “He was a commander and an important person in the JeM,” Inspector General of Kashmir Police Swayam Prakash Pani said. However, when the encounter broke out, the forces had never anticipated that their adversary would be Azhar’s close aide and someone who has been at the helm of new recruitment for his organisa...

The Times of India May 03, 2018 The government has asked the home ministry to stick to its remit while clearing foreign investment proposals after it came to light that several unsubstantiated concerns had been expressed by low-ranking officials, which delayed decisions. With the abolition of the Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB), the inter ministerial agency for foreign direct investment (FDI), proposals were expected to be cleared quickly. But in sectors such as telecom and I&B, proposals were taking longer to clear, which was initially blamed on the administrative ministries. But later, it turned out that comments from the home ministry were resulting in proposals getting held up. Under the current regime, a security clearance is needed from the home ministry. In several cases, it was found that the home ministry’s comments were not backed by sufficient proof, said a source. For instance, in one case, apprehensions were expressed about a director of a...

Tribune May 01, 2018 Despite a decent growth rate, the Federal Board of Revenue has missed its 10-month target by Rs135 billion, indicating that it will not be able to achieve even the downward revised tax target of Rs3.935 trillion for 2017-18. From July through April, the FBR has recorded a provisional net revenue of over Rs2.922 trillion, said the tax-collection body on Monday. The collection was Rs409 billion or 16% higher than the Rs2.513 trillion collection during July-April period of the previous fiscal year. However, the FBR had originally set Rs3.057-trillion as the collection target for July-April period. K-P has highest growth rate in Pakistan Parliament had approved a Rs4.013-trillion tax collection target for the outgoing fiscal year. Due to continuous shortfall, the federal government has now officially lowered the target by Rs78 billion to Rs3.935 trillion. But the first ten months indicate that even the downward revised target is unrealistic, as ...

The Hindu May 03, 2018 In the current climate of Dalit assertion that has the potential to frustrate the BJP’s dreams of regaining power in 2019, it is relevant to revisit the era when the Dalits asserted their clout in Indian politics for the first time but were stymied by Mahatma Gandhi. This happened under the charismatic B.R. Ambedkar in the 1920s and 1930s and almost succeeded in gaining separate representation for the “Depressed Classes”, as they were euphemistically termed in British legalese, in the central and provincial legislatures. It is equally important to speculate what it would have done to the Hindu-Muslim equation, and therefore the prospect of Partition, if Ambedkar had succeeded in reaching his goal. This article attempts to answer this question. Deep insecurity The politics of the Muslim elite — and all politics in the run-up to Indian independence was elite politics — was driven primarily by a sense of deep insecurity. This tendency was accentuated...

Tribune April 30, 2018 According to the Global Terrorism Index (2017), Pakistan is ranked fifth-most impacted country by terrorism. Correspondingly, the economic survey (2017) revealed that terrorism caused a loss of Rs407.2 billion to Pakistan’s economy. This number has decreased by approximately 40% from the previous year due to recent military operations. Nonetheless, prolonged use of force to maintain peace causes enervation of resources, energies, human lives, time and finances; and remains an unsustainable solution. Moreover, withdrawal of force may lead to re-activation and upsurge of terrorist activities sometimes with a greater zest as contemporary wars are contested through extremist elements that operate from and within society. In Pakistan, the military with the enforcement of power has been able to address the issue to a large extent. However, a series of terrorist attacks in February 2017 till the recent attack on a military unit in Swat is proof of otherwise....

The Economics Times May 03, 2018 The Supreme Court has set aside the National Green Tribunal order quashing the environmental clearance (EC) granted in 2013 to Adani-Hazira Port Pvt Ltd (AHPPL) for development of port activities at Surat.  A bench comprising Justices A K Sikri and Ashok Bhushan also directed that Rs 25 crore, which the AHPPL had deposited pursuant to NGT's January 2016 order, be refunded to the company. The apex court passed the order after it was apprised that the matter was settled between the parties and the fishermen have also been paid adequate compensation.  “We are also informed that mangroves have also been planted at some other place. In view thereof, since the order of the Tribunal has been worked out, the embargo placed....in the impugned judgement stands removed and is set aside,” the bench said in its order.  The NGT, in its order, had set aside the EC granted by the Ministry of Environment and Forests to the firm and had ...

The Hindu May 03, 2018 The Delhi High Court (HC) judgment revoking Monsanto’s Bollgard-2 patent is fraught with problems. Bollgard-2 is an insecticidal technology which uses a gene called Cry2Ab from the soil bacterium Bacillus Thuringiensis (Bt). When inserted into a cotton plant, the gene confers resistance against cotton pests. Monsanto’s 2008 patent on Bollgard-2 protects several aspects of this technology: the modification of Cry2Ab to make it compatible with the cotton genome, the process of introducing this gene at a specific location in the cotton genome, and the protein expressed by the plant containing the gene. So, why did the Delhi HC reject this patent? The judge reasoned that Monsanto’s Bt gene was useless to farmers unless inserted into a cotton hybrid, which farmers could then grow to repel pests. This insertion is carried out by seed companies, who cross a Bt gene-containing plant (from Monsanto’s donor seeds) with their proprietary cotton varieties. The ju...