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DAWN August 15, 2019 The BBC said on Thursday it will expand shortwave radio news coverage in Kashmir to ease the impact of a communications blackout imposed by the Indian government. The British broadcaster's announcement came after New Delhi scrapped an article of the Indian constitution granting special status to Indian-occupied Kashmir. Occupied Kashmir has been under lockdown since the day before Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the change on August 5. The BBC said the number and length of programmes will grow in a variety of languages spoken in the densely populated region of the Indian-occupied Kashmir. “Given the shutdown of digital services and phone lines in the region, it's right for us to try and increase the provision of news on our short wave radio services,” BBC World Service Director Jamie Angus said in a statement. “The provision of independent and trusted news in places of conflict and tension is one of the core purpose...

Live Mint August 16, 2019 The UN Security Council is expected to discuss the situation in Jammu and Kashmir on Friday after China asked for "closed consultations" on the matter. This is the first time in decades that the UNSC will discuss Kashmir as a subject, two Indian diplomats said. The last time the matter came up at the UNSC was in 1965, while the last time India and Pakistan came up as a topic for discussion was in 1971, one of the diplomats said. The move follows India revoking special status to Jammu and Kashmir last week. Pakistan had condemned the decision and rallied countries like China which had raised objections on the issue. Earlier this week, Pakistan wrote to Poland, the Council President for the month of August, requesting a UNSC meeting, PTI quoting a UN diplomat said. "China asked for closed consultations on the Security Council agenda item 'India Pakistan Question'. The request was in reference to the Pakistani le...

NewsBeezer August 15, 2019 In the last 50 years since its founding, the Indian Space Research Organization (Isro) has come a long way in overcoming technological hurdles and achieving several milestones. In the early 1960s, Isro launched rockets with a payload of only 30-70 kg up to a height of 150 km from a Launchpad in Thumba in Kerala's Trivandrum (now Thiruvananthapuram) and now launched 4,000 kg of payload in the geostationary orbit at 36,000 km altitude. The agency's gigantic leap in space technology was phenomenal, whether it was the development of a low-temperature engine to power the heavy-duty launcher or India's heaviest Gsat-1 When Isro was founded on August 15, 1969, the country had neither space infrastructure nor know-how to fire large rockets. But now the agency has a number of missiles in the arsenal. The PSLV can not only lift over a hundred satellites at once, but also place satellites in different orbits in a single mission. Likewise, its GSL...

NDTV  August 15, 2019 British national Christian Michel, the alleged middleman in the Rs. 3,600-crore AgustaWestland VVIP chopper deal case, has been interrogated for more than 600 hours to date by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), according to bail pleas filed by him. "The applicant has undergone almost 600 hours of custodial interrogation by both the agencies. As of today, the applicant has spent 375 days in custody including the period which he spent in Dubai jail," as per the plea filed through Advocate Aljo K. Joseph. Special CBI Judge Arvind Kumar on Wednesday issued notices to both the agencies and sought their response on the plea. The matter will come up for hearing on August 19. The plea also claimed that Michel has made no attempt to suborn the witnesses, tamper with the documentary evidence, or in any other manner pollute or obstruct the judicial process. Michel undertakes to supply any such sol...

Micky  August 15, 2019 The proposed new Financial Action Task Force regulations for cryptocurrency exchanges tying individuals to transactions may not be legally binding as yet, but they’ve made more than a few Bitcoin investors nervous. Some are now turning to ‘virgin Bitcoin’, paying a 10% to 30% premium for ‘clean’, often freshly mined, Bitcoin. What is ‘virgin Bitcoin’? ‘Virgin Bitcoin’ is essentially Bitcoin with a clean transaction history – or no transaction history at all. There’s no way of verifying where it came from and it cannot be linked to a wallet or cold storage entity. Investors don’t want to own Bitcoin that has been used on the black markets, stolen in hacks, or used for other illegal or nefarious purposes. With every transaction recorded for all time on the blockchain, the concern is that any Bitcoin that has ever been used in a criminal enterprise could be forfeited or held indeterminately by authorities, whether it is seized or ...

The Economic Times  August 15, 2019 The World Trade Organization (WTO) set up panels on Thursday to rule on complaints by Australia, Brazil and Guatemala against India's export subsidies for sugar NSE 0.31 % and sugarcane producers which they assert are illegal, a Geneva trade official said.  The decision was automatic upon the complainants' second request at a closed-door meeting of the WTO's Dispute Settlement Body.  India will keep its sugar export subsidies despite complaints to the WTO from rival producers, though it will tweak how it provides them, four sources directly involved in the matter said told Reuters in Mumbai last month.  Reference:  https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/foreign-trade/wto-to-rule-on-india-sugar-export-subsidies/articleshow/70690206.cms

The Print August 14, 2019 The risk of overseas investors in rupee bonds getting caught wrong-footed and weakening India’s currency further is surging as losses this month outpace Asian peers amid mounting geopolitical tensions in the region. A sharp drop in the rupee may wipe out most of the profits for offshore investors as they don’t usually hedge currency risk for short-term debt investments into the country, according to Samir Lodha, chief executive officer at QuantArt Market Solutions, a Mumbai-based currency risk advisory. Any sell-off in foreign holdings of Indian corporate and government bonds may set off a spin which weakens the currency further. The surge in inbound investments into rupee bonds was largely driven by carry trades, adding to fears of a quick reversal in flows if the drop in rupee is not checked. The currency slumped more than 3.6% against the greenback this month, setting it up for its second-worst monthly loss since September 2013, as India esc...

Money Life August 14, 2019 The fifth status report, filed by the government-appointed board of Infrastructure Leasing& Financial Services (IL&FS) today, includes a rather disappointing report from Grant Thornton (GT) which completely misses the core issues with regard to what happened between Allied Financial Services Ltd (Allied), the brokerage firm which had a clearing account with IL&FS Securities Services Ltd (ISSL), and its relationship with the three complainants. In this case, three entities headed by Puneet Dalmia–OCL India Ltd (OCL), Dalmia Cement East Ltd and Novjoy Emporium—have alleged that their broker, Allied Financial, has stolen Rs344 crore of securities from their demat accounts. The complaint has snowballed into a much bigger, systemic issue when Allied’s accounts were frozen and, consequently, ISSL, as the clearing member, defaulted on payments to National Clearing Corporation Ltd (NCCL).  NCCL, in turn, disabled IL&FS Securities, ...

Business Line  August 13, 2019 Managing India’s groundwater has become a big challenge for policymakers. Over the years, the challenge has become very complex, with political economy taking dominance over hard science. Since groundwater overdraft is also linked to subsidised power supply to agriculture, researchers had explored how the mode of electricity pricing supplied to agriculture could be changed to control groundwater abstraction and to achieve the goals of efficiency, equity and sustainability. The most frequently suggested instrument for controlling groundwater draft was the metering and pro-rata pricing of electricity. In India, there is a large body of research which raises scepticism about the viability of metering irrigation pumpsets, claiming that it is political suicide for any government to even think about installing meters in farmers’ field, and that whenever it did do so, it led to fall of the government. However, there was no reality check o...

Business Line August 13, 2019 In the farmer suicide-prone Yavatmal district of Maharashtra, about 4.5 lakh hectares of cotton has been planted. The State government officials are worried that about 20 per cent of it are herbicide tolerant BT (HTBT) and other unapproved cotton varieties. In the last 15 years, the district has seen hundreds of farmers committing suicide following cotton crop failures. Seed sales down A senior government official told BusinessLine on condition of anonymity that an area of 4.5 lakh hectares require about 11.25 lakh packets of cotton seeds, but the sale was down by a couple of lakh packets, which confirms the field information that farmers have planted HTBT cotton. Framers believe that even BT cotton is not immune to pink bollworm attack. They are looking for a new solution and their leaders say that the alternative to BT cotton is HTBT. Small-scale planting of HTBT has been happening for the last three years, but this year t...

First Post August 13, 2019 The decision by Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil giant Aramco to pick up a 20 percent stake in the hydrocarbon businesses of Reliance Industries is a move pregnant with business, strategic and geopolitical implications. That this deal — a marker of close and strengthening ties between the two nations — has been announced at a time when Pakistan is trying to rally the Muslim world against India for its move on Kashmir, suggests Pakistan’s diplomatic isolation and underscores Narendra Modi’s major foreign policy win. One of Modi’s key foreign policy planks has been to improve India’s relationship with countries in West Asia, where India has huge strategic and economic interests and enduring people-to-people ties. In his first term, Modi focused on building and nurturing ties with key players to safeguard India’s interests and, at the same time, strike a personal chord with nearly all West Asian leaders, many of whom do not see eye to eye. Modi’s West ...