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C. Rangarajan AUGUST 14, 2018 ith more than one quarter of the year and two months of the monsoon over, it is time to take a look at what the whole year is going to be like. Are there signs of recovery? If there are, are they robust? What are the short- and medium-term concerns of the country? Sectoral trends The monsoon has been somewhat below expectations — the overall rainfall deficiency was 3% (as of July 25). Though it may seem negligible, it has to be noted that there were 11 meteorological divisions (of a total of 36) which were deficient. The area sown has come down. Rice-producing Bihar, for instance, has been severely affected. However, the monsoon can pick up. There is no consensus on the future behaviour of the monsoon. Agricultural growth may at best be equal to what it was last year — 3.4%. The services sector may perform better because public expenditure will be maintained at a high level. This is to be expected, as this happens to be the year before the...

Madhu Ramnath 12/AUG/2018 India has had a long experience with cash crops. These include sugarcane, rubber, cashew, tea and coffee, coconut etc., all grown with the intention of increasing the farmer’s income. The most recent one, palm oil, though also linked to the country’s economy, has a certain national fervour attached to it – it is to help the nation minimise its foreign currency expenditure. India is the largest palm oil (Elaeis guineensis) importer today, spending about $10 billion on it in 2015, even more than it spends on importing gold. Gold is more opulent and visible; palm oil is less obvious, hiding in all our essential commodities like soaps and food products, in much of the street food we consume, even mixed with our other edible oils. As a consequence, the Indian ecological and social footprint in Indonesia and Malaysia, from where it imports its palm oil, is enormous. Worried as we are about saving our foreign exchange, the Union cabinet under Narendra M...

Sunny Verma , Sadaf Modak | Mumbai, New Delhi |  August 14, 2018  The government Monday removed former MD and CEO of Allahabad Bank Usha Ananthasubramanian from service and granted permission to the CBI to prosecute her and former PNB executive director Sanjiv Sharan in the Rs 14,000-crore  Nirav   Modi scam, senior Finance Ministry officials said. Ananthasubramanian, who was a former CEO of PNB, and Sharan were in May divested of all powers by their banks after they were named in the CBI charge sheet relating to the scam. Ananthasubramanian was to superannuate Monday but has now been dismissed. Apart from the CBI, the RBI had also sought government sanction for prosecution of Ananthasubramanian and Sharan under the Banking Regulation Act (BRA). The Centre would soon accede to the RBI’s demand, the officials said. “The RBI is empowered to take action under the BRA against them. The government sanction will enable the regulator to file an FIR against...

 C. Raja Mohan | August 14, 2018 It is not often that China’s envoys to Delhi find time to visit Punjab. That is what Luo Zhaohui did last week. Besides wearing a turban, drinking lassi, chatting with farmers and paying obeisance at the Golden Temple, Ambassador Luo went to the Indo-Pak border at Attari-Wagah. After watching the popular flag-lowering ceremony, Luo tweeted his hope for “peace, friendship and cooperation” between India and Pakistan. Such sentiment, of course, runs against Delhi’s traditional wariness on China’s role in India-Pakistan relations over the last many decades. Sceptics might say Luo’s hope is less about articulating China’s policy than the envoy’s well-known high-octane diplomatic style. A number of factors, however, might be at work in the north western Subcontinent to nudge the narrative on the triangular relationship in a more positive direction. One is Beijing’s interest in making the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the flagship ...

Agence France-Presse, ISTANBUL,  AUGUST 13, 2018  Central Bank offers liquidity assistance but no rate hike Turkey’s Central Bank on Monday sought to calm markets rattled by the precipitous plunge of the Turkish lira as a defiant President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan chastised the U.S. for seeking to stab Ankara “in the back”. A dispute between NATO allies Turkey and the United States — which reached new intensity over the detention of an American pastor — has hammered the lira and also raised questions over the future partnership between Washington and Ankara. As the latest developments caused the lira to plunge further in value, investors fretted over potential economic contagion from Turkey, particularly to European banks. Lira’s 16% tumble The already embattled Turkish lira tumbled some 16% against the dollar on Friday as U.S. President Donald Trump said he had doubled tariffs on steel and aluminium from Turkey. “We are together in NATO and then you seek to ...

Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee 14/08/2018 The media-vilified student of JNU, Umar Khalid, who recently submitted his doctoral thesis after the Delhi high court ordered a reluctant administration to accept it, after having tea with friends at a tea stall at Constitutional Club, moved towards the entrance of the Club, when an unidentified gunman in a white shirt and with long hair, first attacked him, and after a scuffle, shot at him from a distance. By the grace of fate, Khalid escaped unhurt. As Khalid’s friends tried to catch the assailant, he fired aerial shots. The gun jammed, and the man dropped it, and escaped. Khalid was at the venue to participate in an event titled, ‘Towards a Freedom without Fear’. Little did he know that fear was lurking so close by. It is incredible that a gunman could freely slip through right under the nose of the high-security zone, two days before Independence Day. It escapes no one in India right now that assailants fueled by toxic nationalism are...

PTI 13August,2018 India’s dependency on fertiliser imports will continue in the medium-term, though urea imports are likely to decline as a new manufacturing capacity comes on-stream under the New Investment Policy 2012, according to a report. Returns from the new urea manufacturing capacity coming on-stream are likely to be strong, subject to the timely receipt of subsidy and offtake above 85 per cent, India Ratings and Research (Ind-Ra) said in a report. Ind-Ra estimates urea imports to decline to nil by FY21. “We do not have domestic reserves of MOP and hence will continue to import 100 per cent of potash. Globally, the potash market is controlled by five companies, given their proximity to the raw material. The usage of muriate of potash (MOP) in India largely depends on the price payable by the end-user,” the report added. Meanwhile, di-ammonium phosphate (DAP) is produced either from rock phosphate (RP) or phosphoric acid (PA) domestically or is imported directl...

Aug 13, 2018, BEIJING: China is printing currencies for the governments of several countries, including Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Brazil, the Chinese media reported, quoting a top official of the state-owned banknote printer. Liu Guisheng, Chairman of China Banknote Printing and Minting Corporation, wrote in an article in May in China Finance, a bi-monthly journal run by China's central bank, that China obtained the first international commercial order for printing money from Nepal in 2015. The state-owned firm won the bids of 100 rupees, 1,000 rupees and 5 rupees from Nepal, Liu said. Since then the company had "seized the opportunities brought by the initiative" and "successfully won contracts for currency production projects in a number of countries" including Thailand, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Brazil and Poland, Liu wrote. The 'China Banknote Printing and Minting Corporation' confirmed that money production ...