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Times of India, June 07, 2018 The last six months have seen a flurry of funding activity in the daily grocery and milk delivery space. With established venture capital (VC) firms such as Blume Ventures and Kalaari capital investing in the space, entrepreneurs and investors say that organisation of the fragmented milk and daily needs delivery market has attracted attention from investors. Recent deals in the space include Milkbasket raising $7 million in series-A funding from Kalaari and Blume, Doodhwala raking in undisclosed pre series-A funding from a US-based hedge fund, Raincan seeing an investment from IIFL Holdings and Supr Daily raising $ 1.5 million, according to data from research firm Venture Intelligence. The startups either run on a subscription model or can place orders the previous day. Bengaluru-based Doodhwala operates in the 4 a.m.-7 a.m. time slot, delivering milk, daily grocery and perishables every day. Claiming to touch customers’ up to 25 times a month, ...

Times of India, June 07, 2018 The government on Wednesday promulgated an Ordinance to amend the  Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code  (IBC) and treat  home buyers  in ailing  real estate companies on a par with banks in the  resolution process . The tag of financial creditors will allow buyers of apartments in Jaypee Infratech and Amrapali projects to have a say in ensuring that their interests are not compromised during the resolution process. Corporate affairs secretary Injeti Srinivas told reporters that the Ordinance empowers even a single home buyer to approach the National Company Law Tribunal to initiate insolvency proceedings against a realtor. But it is not sufficient to offer them the same rights as the lenders in case the company goes into liquidation as the home buyers will have to prove that they are secured creditors. “It will depend on the agreement that the home buyers have signed. But the Ordinance recognises the special status that hom...

Indian Express, June 07, 2018 The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Wednesday said it will allow urban cooperative banks to voluntarily convert themselves into small finance banks. “The High Powered Committee on urban cooperative banks (UCBs), chaired by R. Gandhi, the then Deputy Governor of Reserve Bank, had, inter alia, recommended the voluntary conversion of large Multi-State UCBs into Joint Stock Companies and other UCBs which meet certain criteria into Small Finance Banks (SFBs). Taking these recommendations into consideration, it has been decided to allow voluntary transition of UCBs meeting the prescribed criteria into SFBs,” said the regulator said in its statement on developmental and regulatory policies. Deputy Governor NS Vishwanathan said the RBI will come out with a detailed scheme norms for conversion of urban cooperative banks into small finance banks. “There has been demands from some quarters that we must allow them (UCBs) to corporatise. Since small finance ...

Indian Express, June 07, 2018 It is a 10-year-old promise, but it seems as though India may not keep it. When the United Nations General Assembly votes Friday for five non-permanent seats in the Security Council, countries have to choose between candidates. One of these seats is in the Asia-Pacific group, with two candidates — Maldives and Indonesia. From at least 2008, India has promised Maldives its support in this election. A joint statement in December 2008, when President Mohamed Nasheed visited New Delhi, said: “…India expressed appreciation to the Maldives side for its support to India’s candidature for a permanent seat in the expanded Security Council and for its candidature to the non-permanent member seat of the UN Security Council for the year 2011-2012. Maldives also thanked India for its support for its candidature to the non-permanent seat of UN Security Council for the year 2019-20.”  Earlier that year, then Prime Minister  Manmohan Singh  had “...

Indian Express, June 07, 2018 The Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) — the central bank’s rate-setting panel — Wednesday raised the repo rate (the short-term lending rate at which it lends money to commercial banks) by 25 basis points. (One basis point is one-hundredth of a percentage point.) This was the first time interest rates were increased since the NDA government came to power in May 2014, and effectively signalled the end of the rate-easing cycle for now. Rates had been on hold since the last cut in August 2017. The rate hike appeared to be a precautionary move against the backdrop of global volatility in crude and elevated commodity inflation worldwide. It was contrary to the broader market expectation that the RBI would hold rates while revising its stance from ‘neutral’ to ‘tighten’, and came as a reassertion by the bank of its inflation-targeting role, and a signal that it did not want to fall behind the curve on its primary mandate. ...

Indian Express, June 07, 2018 The Reserve Bank of India has decided to set up a Public Credit Registry (PCR) “to foster the level of access to credit and strengthen the credit culture…” The PCR will be the single point of mandatory reporting for all material events for each loan, notwithstanding any threshold in the loan amount or type of borrower. The PCR will serve as a registry of all credit contracts, duly verified by reporting institutions, for all lending in India and any lending by an Indian institution to a company incorporated in India. The RBI considered the recommendations of YM Deosthalee-headed High Level Task Force and decided to set up a PCR. An Implementation Task Force (ITF) is being constituted to help design and undertake logistics for the next steps in setting up of the PCR, RBI said. Currently, there are multiple granular credit information repositories in India, each with distinct objective and coverage. Within the RBI, CRILC is a borrower-level supe...

Indian Express, June 07, 2018 The Delhi High Court Wednesday termed as infructuous a plea by Sasan Power Ltd, a Reliance Power subsidiary, seeking permission to extract excess coal from two mines in Madhya Pradesh, saying that the Centre was already examining the issue. “The respondents (Union of India and Ministry of Coal) are examining the requests for increase in the variations in the mining cap on behalf of the petitioner (SPL) on the basis of factual disclosures made by them. The application is therefore, dismissed as infructuous,” a bench of Acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and C Hari Shankar said. The bench noted that an inter ministerial committee had severely criticised the mining being conducted by Sasan Power Ltd (SPL) holding that there was high moisture content in the coal due to water not being properly pumped out. The court observed that SPL was asked to improve the quality of mining. The committee, led by the chairman, Central Electricity Authority, was form...

Times of India, June 06, 2018 The Reserve Bank of India ( RBI ) on Wednesday decided to increase key rates following its June monetary policy meet. The Reserve Bank's six-member MPC (monetary policy committee), headed by governor Urjit Patel, hiked the repo rate by 25 bps (basis points) to 6.25 per cent.  The repo rate is the rate at which the RBI lends short-term money to the banks. The central bank has also increased the reverse repo rate -- the rate at which the RBI borrows from commercial banks -- to 6 per cent.  "The decision of the MPC is consistent with the neutral stance of monetary policy in consonance with the objective of achieving the medium-term target for consumer price index (CPI) inflation of 4 per cent within a band of +/- 2 per cent, while supporting growth," the RBI said in a statement. The Reserve Bank Governor Urjit Patel, in a media briefing, said that the rates have been hiked after "a prolonged pause". In the second bi-mont...

Business Standard, June 06, 2018 Facebook Inc said it had data-sharing partnerships with four Chinese consumer-device makers, including  Huawei  Technologies Co, escalating concerns that the social network has consistently failed to tell users how their personal information flows beyond Facebook. The disclosure came after Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said earlier Tuesday that he saw "a serious danger" that Facebook shared user information with Chinese device makers. Facebook said it was careful about the partnerships, which were designed to help smartphone makers build custom versions of Facebook's app. Still, the confirmation is likely to heighten scrutiny of the company's privacy practices if the deals weren't explicitly disclosed to users. "Facebook's integrations with Huawei, Lenovo, OPPO, and  TCL  were controlled from the get-go -- and we approved the Facebook experiences these  companie s built,...

Indian Express, June 07,2018 An “overreaction” by the Reserve Bank of India in its monetary policy review, which got underway Monday, is an area of concern for the Government, Niti Aayog Vice Chairman Rajiv Kumar told The Indian Express. The visible increase in core inflation could just be a “transitory phase” and the central bank “shouldn’t panic into believing that this is a sign of inflationary expectations getting entrenched”, Kumar said. Core inflation, which excludes food and fuel components, was at 5.92 per cent in April while general CPI (Consumer Price Index) inflation stood at 4.58 per cent in the same month. As core inflation rises, there is an expectation that the RBI may hike its key policy lending rate, or the repo rate. The Monetary Policy Committee (MPC), the rate-setting body of the RBI, began its second bi-monthly review from June 4-June 6 in Mumbai. Asked whether the RBI may overreact to rise in CPI inflation, Kumar said: “RBI’s overreaction is always a...

Indian Express, June 05, 2018 WITH THE 2019 elections approaching, Goa’s Archbishop Filipe Neri Ferrao has advised Catholics to play an “active role” in politics while warning that the “the Indian Constitution is in danger” and that “a kind of monoculturalism” has gripped the country. In his annual pastoral letter for 2018-19, which was released Sunday, Ferrao wrote: “It is advisable that the lay faithful play an active role in the political field; they should, however, follow the dictates of their conscience while doing so and shun ‘sycophantic’ politics. They should thus strengthen democracy and, on the other hand, help to improve the functioning of the state administration. The ideals of social justice and the fight against corruption are of utmost importance.” Stating that people across the country are being “uprooted from their land and homes in the name of development”, the Archbishop warned that “human rights is being trampled” as “in recent times we see a new trend em...

Indian Express, June 06, 2018 For reasons of both history and geography, citizenship, identity, and immigration have long been sensitive and flammable issues in Assam. The exercise to update the six-and-a-half-decade-old National Register of Citizens (NRC), the second draft of which is due to be out by the end of this month, and a controversial amendment proposed to the Citizenship Act, 1955, that seeks to selectively regularise some categories of illegal migration, have triggered a fresh wave of anxiety and unrest around these issues. What are the broad features of the concept of citizenship in the Constitution, and how have they played out in the specific context of Assam? Who is a citizen in India’s constitutional scheme? What are various principles/kinds of citizenship? Citizenship defines the relationship of an individual with a political community, and signifies the individual’s full and equal membership of that community. A citizen is defined in opposition to an ‘ali...

Indian Express, June 06, 2018 More than a month after the informal summit in Wuhan on April 27-28, New Delhi and Beijing have come up with a list of about 100 do-ables that have emerged out of the one-on-one conversation between Prime Minister  Narendra Modi , sources have told  The Indian Express . Efforts are now underway to prune this list to a modest list of “about 20 achievable deliverables” which can be achieved within a short term. “The two leaders had spent a lot of time together for almost two days….four out of seven interactions were one-on-one…and since the format was quite free-flowing, they discussed a range of issues. We are now trying to list the priority areas,” a source said. The 100-odd items on the list include softer issues like export of films, trainers for sportspersons, Chinese and Hindi language training to access for pharmaceutical companies, agriculture produce entering Chinese market, addressing trade deficit and confidence-building measu...