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The Indian Express, March 18, 2019 Last week, IIT Guwahati, IIT Mandi and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore announced collaboration in a pan-Indian, multi-institutional initiative to develop a ‘Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment for the Indian Himalayan Region Using a Common Framework’. The exercise is unique because for the first time all the 12 Indian Himalayan Region (IHR) states have used a common framework resulting in the production of comparable state-level and within state, district-level vulnerability maps. “Such comparable vulnerability assessments are useful for government officials, implementers, decision-makers, funding agencies and development experts to have a common understanding on vulnerability, enabling them to assess which state in IHR is more vulnerable, what has made them vulnerable, and how they might address these vulnerabilities,” the institutes said in a statement. The principle investigators of the project are Anamika Barua (IIT

The Indian Express, March 18, 2019 The Election Commission of India’s latest data on political parties, registered till March 9, a day before the Lok Sabha elections were announced, reveal that the country is having a total of 2,293 political parties. They include seven “recognised national” and 59 “recognised state” parties. “Bharosa Party”, “Sabsi Badi Party”, and “Rashtriya Saaf Niti Party” are some of the 2,300-odd political parties that India has on the eve of the 2019 general elections. Advertising In fact, 149 political parties were registered with the poll panel between February and March on the eve of the announcement of the poll schedule. Till February this year, the country had 2,143 political parties registered with the Commission, with 58 of them getting registered ahead of the assembly polls in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Telangana, Mizoram and Chhattisgarh during November-December last year. Some of the recently registered 149 parties include Bahujan A

The Indian Express, March 18, 2019 The $5 billion rupee-dollar swap window announced by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) will lead to downward movement in interest rates as injection of higher rupee liquidity will help lower yields on government bonds. Advertising Sources said this will bring down interest costs for high-rated Indian companies raising resources through external commercial borrowings (ECBs), while at the same time making rupee bonds more attractive for foreign investors. The rub-off effect of this move, along with benign inflation forecast and slowing industrial growth, will nudge the RBI Monetary Policy Committee to cut interest rates further in the policy review next month. According to participants in the fixed income market, the interest rate swaps which are used to indicate future movements in rates, are pointing towards 25-50 basis points rate reduction in next few months. These swaps are used to hedge interest rate risk by fixed interest rate

Financial Express, March 18, 2019 By Ashok Gulati & Ritika Juneja Just ahead of the 2019 general elections dates announcement, the prime minister launched the centrally sponsored ‘Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi’ (PM-Kisan) scheme of Rs 75,000 crore for small and marginal farm families. On February 24, 2019, from Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh, he transferred the first installment of Rs 2,000 each (out of `6,000 per annum) into the bank accounts of 1.01 crore farm families, amounting to `2,021 crore. By March 9, 2.6 crore farm families had, in totality, been given `5,215 crore. The target is to cover about 12.6 crore beneficiary farm families by the end of March 2019. Although the amount involved per family is too little, and coming too late, direct income support (DIS) marks a beginning of a new policy direction. It can reach about 86% of farm families compared to loan waivers that can benefit only a maximum of 30% of peasantry and a higher MSP policy which can benefit a m