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Bloomberg August 13, 2019 China’s Belt and Road Initiative is seeing a revival lately, after a year of rumblings from developing nations that President Xi Jinping had set them a debt trap in the guise of funding massive infrastructure projects. In the first half of this year, Commerce Ministry data show, Beijing signed about $64 billion in new, mostly construction contracts, a jump of 33% from 2018. Back then, Malaysia was complaining of deals reached under a scandal-stricken ousted leader and Indonesia was gearing up for elections in which both sides played up nationalist credentials. And now? Emerging markets are coming back to the negotiating table. Malaysia restarted the $20 billion East Coast Rail Link in July, reversing a decision to terminate it. In Indonesia, the controversial Jakarta-Bandung high-speed railway plan is back on track after more than two years of delays, and new power plant and housing projects have been approved.  What caused this change...

UCAN August 13, 2019 Indian Christians of socially poor Dalit groups observed a “black day” to highlight what they call state discrimination that denies them statutory social benefits because of their Christian faith. Dalit leaders gathered in New Delhi on Aug. 10 to mark the 69th anniversary of then-president Rajendra Prasad signing a 1950 order that only Dalit people belonging to the Hindu religion should be considered Dalits. “We all know that justice delayed is justice denied. Yes, it is a long wait but we should not lose hope,” Father Vijay Kumar Nayak, secretary of the Indian bishops’ office for Dalits and lower classes, told the gathering. The presidential order effectively reserved social benefits, specified in the constitution for the advancement of Dalit people, only to Hindus. It was amended twice — in 1956 and 1990 — to include Sikhs and Buddhists, but Muslim and Christian Dalits continue to be excluded from benefits. For the past two decades, India...

The Guardian  August 14, 2019 A Danish bank has launched the world’s first negative interest rate mortgage – handing out loans to homeowners where the charge is minus 0.5% a year. Negative interest rates effectively mean that a bank pays a borrower to take money off their hands, so they pay back less than they have been loaned. Jyske Bank, Denmark’s third largest, has begun offering borrowers a 10-year deal at -0.5%, while another Danish bank, Nordea, says it will begin offering 20-year fixed-rate deals at 0% and a 30-year mortgage at 0.5%. Under its negative mortgage, Jyske said borrowers will make a monthly repayment as usual – but the amount still outstanding will be reduced each month by more than the borrower has paid. “We don’t give you money directly in your hand, but every month your debt is reduced by more than the amount you pay,” said Jyske’s housing economist, Mikkel Høegh. In recognition of how puzzling the new mortgage is for customers, the...

Hindustan Times August 14, 2019 Chhattisgarh has become the second state in the country after Odisha to give recognition to forest lands acquired by scheduled tribes and other traditional forest dwellers, according to a government statement So far, 400,000 individual and 24,000 community forest rights certificates have been distributed in the state while according recognition to 342,000 hectares of land in individual claims and 950,000 hectares of land in community claims, the statement released on Tuesday said Soon after taking charge on January 23 as chief minister of Chhattisgarh, Bhupesh Baghel organised a state-level workshop on forest rights and reviewed its implementation. He said that it is the state government’s priority to provide forest rights to all claimants of forest rights certificates,” said Taran Prakash Sinha, director public relations, Chhattisgarh government. Sinha further said that during the workshop, it was found out that a large number of cla...

Dawn  August 14, 2019 The GSP+ facility, implemented from Jan 1, 2014, helped promote exports from Pakistan to the EU by almost 21 per cent in the first year. However, “no tangible growth was recorded in export proceeds to EU in the following four years”, a senior official of the commerce ministry said. He admitted that the full potential of GSP+ is yet to be achieved despite the fact that the facility has been in place for the last five years. Before the GSP+ scheme, Pakistan’s exports to 28-member EU stood at €4.54 billion in 2013, which jumped to €5.51bn in 2014. In the second year of the GSP+ scheme, exports further jumped by 10pc to €6.09bn. However, since 2016 the exports proceeds have remained stagnant at €6.30bn in 2016, €6.69bn in 2017 and €6.88bn in 2018. On the other hand, Pakistan’s imports from EU, which were at €3.84bn in 2013, have also increased in tandem with exports during the last four years to reach €5.66bn in 2018. In the post-GSP+ period,...

pIndia August 10. 2019 Every FCRA-NGO has to submit an Annual Return to the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), online before 31st December for its foreign fund receipts for the previous financial year. Until 2015, this format was called the FC6; later, with a few modifications, it was called the FC4 form. These annual returns are available online for anyone to read or download at the website of FCRA, year-wise, since 2006. Very recently, MHA has revised the FC4 form which demands the FCRA-NGOs to provide a lot more information, not just about the ‘donations’ they received from abroad, but also how much of it they have deposited in Fixed Deposits, etc. Here, we summarize a few of the key features of this revised FC4 form. We will do this through the means of an example. For this purpose, let us consider the FC4 return filed by the FCRA-NGO, ‘Reaching The Unreached (RTU)’, G. Kallupatti, Theni district, Tamil Nadu, for the year 2018-19 and whose FCRA registration number is: ...