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Business Standard June 13, 2019 The Reserve Bank of India (RBI)-appointed committee to review the economic capital framework of the central bank failed to arrive at a consensus during a meeting held here on Wednesday, leading to a delay in finalising its report, a top official said. The six-member committee headed by former RBI governor Bimal Jalan decided to meet once again before submitting its report by the end of this month. “There may be differences of opinion (among the panel members), but that’s being discussed,” an official aware of the development said, requesting anonymity. The committee, formed in December 2018, was supposed to submit its report by April 8, 2019, but it was later given a three-month extension. One of the key mandates of the committee was to determine the level of surplus that the RBI should hold. Wednesday’s meet was supposed to be the last one for the panel. However, there will be at least one more round of meeting to be held later t...

ORF June 11, 2019 It is an irony of sorts that despite the effort made by the Modi government in its first term to keep on the right side of the erratic Donald Trump, President of the United States, the going with our strategic partner is getting tougher. The US has withdrawn the preferential trading treatment accorded to India just a month after New Delhi quietly stopped trading oil with Iran in the wake of an American demarche. Now, another humiliation stares us in the face as Uncle Sam pushes us to abandon our deal with the Russians for the supply of   S-400   missile systems. The official spokesman, Raveesh Kumar, told journalists last week that he was not ready to share any information as to how India would deal with the demand. All he was willing to say was ‘you know we already have a contract which had been signed and you already know that the steps are being taken to implement the contract’. In essence, what the US is saying is that if India wants a str...

BBC June 07, 2019 China's WeChat is a site for social interaction, a form of currency, a dating app, a tool for sporting teams and deliverer of news: Twitter, Facebook, Googlemaps, Tinder and Apple Pay all rolled into one. But it is also an ever more powerful weapon of social control for the Chinese government. I've just been locked out of WeChat (or Weixin 微信 as it is known in Chinese) and, to get back on, have had to pass through some pretty Orwellian steps - steps which have led others to question why I went along with it. One reason is that life in Beijing would be extremely difficult without WeChat. The other is that I could not have written this piece without experiencing the stages which have now clearly put my image, and even my voice, on some sort of biometric database of troublemakers. I was in Hong Kong to cover the enormous candlelight vigil marking 30 years since the People's Liberation Army was ordered to open fire on its own people to remo...

The Telegraph June 13, 2019 Once, in the early 1970s, I asked a very learned uncle why India had fallen off the knowledge map after the Gupta Empire declined. He thought for so long that I was about to repeat my question when he replied. “Because,” he said, “Indian intellect busied itself with the arcane, which as it became even more arcane became even more irrelevant. The method was tarka-vitarka – argument and counter-argument – which had but one purpose: vanquishing your rival’s point of view by debate.” He went on to explain how the Brahmins, who had a near-complete monopoly on knowledge, busied themselves with increasingly esoteric questions about the cosmos, epistemology, teleology and suchlike. “It was useless knowledge from society’s point of view and left us in a weakened state.” I am recalling this conversation -- which I have summarised hugely -- because of the research paper the former Chief Economic Adviser to the Finance Ministry, Arvind Subramanian, ...

Mongabay September 17, 2018 In a region where Bt cotton rules the roost, Kamal Kishore Dhiran, a farmer in Balodi, 50 km from Yavatmal (in Vidarbha region of Maharashtra) is an outlier. He has been planting desi cotton seeds and withstood the pressure to grow transgenic or Bt cotton since it was introduced in 2002. He was once part of a successful organic cotton venture – the Vidarbha Organic Farmers Association (VOFA) which is now defunct, and which used to export organic cotton. Dhiran still grows ‘straight’ (as opposed to hybrid) varieties of cotton; he sources it from the Punjabrao Deshmukh Krishi Vidyapeeth in Akola every few years. He is among the few farmers who saves the seed and only buys fresh ones every three years or so. Dhiran has been a farmer since 1960, and owns 60 acres. He did try out hybrid cotton seeds and grew them with fertilisers and other chemicals – soon he found the yields were falling and he decided to grow desi (indigenous) cotton which was m...

The Print June 05, 2019 How does   Pakistan’s  deep state continue to influence debate around the world? By deploying people to disrupt public events, of course. Let me explain how this happens. I appeared recently on a television programme filmed at the Newseum in Washington DC that promised to the tell the “whole truth” about US-Pakistan relations. Ordinarily, I would have asked about the composition of the panel but, in this case, I did not because I assumed the effort was credible because the show was tied to the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia. I regretted this lapse as soon as I walked into the green room where I met my two co-panellists. One was a retired, senior American diplomat with long ties to South Asia who, in retirement, briefly became a lobbyist for Pakistan. The other was a wealthy Pakistani-American physician serving as a current lobbyist who uses his wealth to influence American policy towards countries of interest. He also is the sole ...

The Indian Express June 13, 2019 In an attempt to provide more preference to domestic manufacturers in government procurement, the Steel Ministry has introduced a notification which mandates imported steel to undergo a higher domestic value addition in making of a product to be eligible for purchase by government departments and all its entities, including state-run firms. And unlike previously, where the minimum value addition criteria kicked in for project purchases of Rs 50 crore and above, the new rules of May 29, 2019, have lowered the threshold to purchases of Rs 25 crore or more. Moreover, these provisions would also kick in for government agencies whose annual procurement of iron and steel products for various projects is Rs 25 crore or more. The May 2019 notification on Policy for Providing Preference to Domestically Manufactured Iron & Steel Products (DMI&SP) in Government Procurement also expands the list of manufactured products to 49 from previous 1...

Bloomberg June 11, 2019 Bitcoin and its fellow cryptocurrencies have surged in popularity partly because they’ve offered a way to skirt the government oversight exercised over traditional financial systems. Well, get ready to kiss much of that autonomy goodbye. On June 21, the Financial Action Task Force -- a multi-government effort that develops recommendations for combating money laundering and financing of terrorism that’s followed by about 200 countries including the U.S. -- will publish a note to clarify how participating nations should oversee virtual assets, FATF spokeswoman Alexandra Wijmenga-Daniel said in an email. The new rules will apply to businesses working with tokens and cryptocurrencies, such as exchanges and custodians and crypto hedge funds. Much depends on how the rules -- long governing traditional bank wire transfers -- will be interpreted and applied by country-specific regulators, but they are “one of the biggest threats to crypto today,” Eric Tu...

Business Standard June 12, 2019 Japan will invest Rs 13,000 crore in several ongoing as well as new infrastructure projects in the northeast region, including a water supply scheme in Assam and a network connectivity improvement initiative in Meghalaya, the DoNER Ministry said Wednesday. Some of the important projects in which Japan will collaborate include the Guwahati water supply project, Guwahati sewage project, the northeast road network connectivity improvement project spread over Assam and Meghalaya and northeast network connectivity improvement project in Meghalaya. Other schemes include biodiversity conservation and forest management project in Sikkim, sustainable forest management project in Tripura, technical cooperation project for sustainable agriculture and irrigation in Mizoram and forest management project in Nagaland, a statement issued by the Ministry of Development of North Eastern Region (DoNER) said. The government of Japan has decided to invest...

The Guardian June 12, 2019 Hundreds of Indian villages have been evacuated as a historic drought forces families to abandon their homes in search of water. The country has seen extremely high temperatures in recent weeks. On Monday the capital, Delhi, saw its highest ever June temperature of 48C. In Rajasthan, the city of Churu recently experienced highs of 50.8C, making it the hottest place on the planet. Further south, less than 250 miles from the country’s commercial capital, Mumbai, village after village lies deserted. Estimates suggest up to 90% of the area’s population has fled, leaving the sick and elderly to fend for themselves in the face of a water crisis that shows no sign of abating. The village of Hatkarwadi, about 20 miles from Beed in Maharashtra state, is almost completely deserted. Wells and handpumps have run dry in the 45C heatwave. The drought, which officials say is worse than the 1972 famine that affected 25 million people across the state,...