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Ratna Bhushan ,  ET Bureau, August 21, 2019, 18% GST forced the company to hike prices which has been affecting their sales NEW DELHI: The country’s largest biscuit maker Parle Products said on Tuesday that it may have to let go of 8,000-10,000 people if the ongoing consumption slowdown persists, indicating that all’s probably not well with the economy. “We have sought reduction in the goods and services tax (GST) on biscuits priced at Rs 100 per kg or below, which are typically sold in packs of Rs 5 and below, but if the government doesn’t provide that stimulus, then we have no choice but to let go of 8,000-10,000 people from our workforce across factories as slowing sales are severely impacting us,” said Mayank Shah, category head of Parle Products. With sales of over Rs 10,000 crore, Parle, which makes the popular Parle-G, Monaco and Marie brand of biscuits, employs 1 lakh people, and operates 10 company-owned plants, in addition to 125 third party manufactur...

19 Aug 2019, Mumbai Auto major Mahindra & Mahindra (M&M) is seeking a fiscal stimulus package from the government for the automobile sector, which had been battling a prolonged slowdown. Pawan Goenka, managing director, M&M, told reporters that the company has retrenched about 1,500 temporary workers since April 1 this year. He said if the slowdown continues the company will be forced to lay off more employees. M&M has deferred about 15-20% of its capex from its overall investment plan. However, he emphasised that the concern on job losses is more at the automotive suppliers and dealers and not as much at original equipment manufacturers. Reference  http://www.millenniumpost.in/big-stories/mm-retrenches-1500-workers-369810

Subhadip Sircar, Last Updated at August 20, 2019 More than two decades since the Asia debt crisis gripped the region, global consulting firm McKinsey & Co is warning that signs of a rerun are “ominous.” Increased indebtedness, stresses in repaying borrowing, lender vulnerabilities and shadow banking practices are some of the concerns cited by McKinsey in an August report. Whether building pressures are “enough to trigger a new crisis remains to be seen” but governments and businesses need to monitor potential causes, authors Joydeep Sengupta and Archana Seshadrinathan wrote. McKinsey’s warning shot comes as a slowing global economy puts pressure on earnings at Asian companies, and the US-China trade war makes debt investors more risk adverse. Still, fund managers point to improved credit metrics of Asian dollar bond issuers in recent years, and Moody’s Investors Service said last week it expects most Asian economies can offset the domestic impact of the global slowd...

By ENS Economic Bureau Mumbai Updated: August 21, 2019 “Timely resolution is very important. I’d request you to ensure that the resolutions are done in time, not just for the regulatory requirement but also because it will result in better valuation going forward,” NS Vishwanathan said at the Ficci-IBA banking conference. Reserve Bank Deputy Governor NS Vishwanathan on Tuesday asked bankers to speed up the resolution of stressed assets under the new framework to extract the best value as decisions on a number of accounts are stuck in a limbo. “Timely resolution is very important. I’d request you to ensure that the resolutions are done in time, not just for the regulatory requirement but also because it will result in better valuation going forward,” he said at the Ficci-IBA banking conference. “We’ve given a lot of freedom to banks to determine various contours. We are making less intrusive regulations and hope that banks will use this to deal with genuine stress in t...

Written by Sujan R Chinoy Updated: August 21, 2019 It is patently wrong to claim, as vested political interests have done in India, that the scrapping of Article 370 has resulted in the “internationalisation of Jammu & Kashmir” and that the informal discussion by UNSC members is the first of its kind in six decades. On August 16, the 15 members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) engaged in closed-door informal consultations in response to a letter written by Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi to the President of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), backed by a request by Pakistan’s “iron brother” China, on the situation in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). A great deal of hullabaloo has been raised about the meeting. However, informal consultations are held in the UNSC all the time. There is no official record of the proceedings nor does the informal exchange result in any outcome document. In this case, the only consensus that had the bac...

AMLAN MISHRA UPDATED AUG 21, 2019 ‘Food has no religion, food is a religion,’ said the Twitter handle of Zomato in its tweet to a man who would not take food from a Muslim delivery guy. On the face of it, this statement captures a powerful idea: that this company cares about its workforce and will not tolerate bigoted customers. Zomato seems to be riding high on this attention that liberal Twitterati is showering on it. But the truth is, Zomato and other similar startups, are some of the worst workplaces to be employed in. A survey carried out by two Oxford researchers rated Zomato ‘4/10’ for its working conditions in India. Overworked Employees Who Receive No Benefits It is important to note that workers in the food delivery industry are not its ‘employees’ according to their official contracts. They are termed ‘independent contractors’ or ‘independent entrepreneurs’. Zomato and other such apps, argue that the app is not actually an employer, but an ‘internet service...

PTI New Delhi, Updated on August 20, 2019 Public sector banks are gearing up to introduce retail products, including housing and auto loans, on ‘psbloansin59minutes’ portal with a view to expand their retail loan business. Currently, the portal gives in-principle approval for loans of up to Rs 1 crore to Micro, Small and Medium enterprises (MSMEs) in just 59 minutes or less than an hour. However, some of the banks including State Bank of India, Union Bank of India and Corporation Bank decided to extend in-principle approval to loans of up to Rs 5 crore through the portal. The Bank of India is now planning to on-board some of the retail products on the portal for easier access to loan products. “The bank is working on this, and home and auto loan will be on-boarded on the portal going forward,” Bank of India General Manager Salil Kumar Swain told PTI. Another state-owned lender Indian Overseas Bank (IOB) also plans to offer retail loan products on the portal. “As...

Madlen Davies @madlendavies , Ben Stockton @ben_stockton , Rahul Meesaraganda Two of India’s biggest drug companies are alleged to be giving inducements to “quack” doctors of gifts and cash to encourage them to prescribe vast amounts of antibiotics, fuelling the rise of drug-resistant superbugs around the world.  Undercover reporting by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has revealed that Abbott and Sun Pharma – whose products and devices are sold and used in more than a hundred countries, including in the US and by the NHS in the UK – promote antibiotics to healthcare practitioners who often have no formal medical training. It is illegal to sell antibiotics to quack doctors in most parts of India, but the law is rarely enforced. There are no restrictions on promoting these drugs to them. The so-called quacks, who are sometimes the only healthcare provider in their impoverished communities, often go on to prescribe antibiotics incorrectly. By offering incomple...

Ria Singh Sawhney,  19/AUG/2019 The Aadhaar project is regulated by the Aadhaar Act, 2016, which was amended in July 2019 (along with the Telegraph Act and Prevention of Money Laundering Act), based on the Supreme Court’s September 2018 judgement on Aadhaar.  Under the amended Aadhaar Act, your basic rights are as follows: What is Aadhaar? Aadhaar is essentially a means of identity verification. When you enrol for Aadhaar, your identity information is stored in the Central Identities Data Repository (CIDR). Identity information includes Aadhaar number, biometric information (fingerprints, iris scan, photograph) and demographic information – name, age, address and so on. Authentication means that identity information (biometric and/or demographic) you provide to a ‘requesting entity’, along with your Aadhaar number, is matched with the corresponding information stored in the CIDR against your Aadhaar number. Example 1: A PDS dealer puts your fingerpr...

MOUSHUMI DAS GUPTA  Updated: 20 August, 2019 Alarmed at the rate at which Union Road Transport & Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari was declaring state roads as National Highways — and the likely financial implications for the central government — the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) has stepped in to review the whole process. Senior government officials told ThePrint that the PMO has also put on hold all new announcements as well as “in-principle approvals” already given to several state roads until a high-level inter-ministerial panel headed by Cabinet Secretary P.K. Sinha approves a new set of comprehensive guidelines. “The PMO stepped in as it was felt that there is a need for some fiscal discipline. The road ministry has bitten off more than it can chew. It will be a burden on the exchequer at a time when the ministry is facing fund constraints,” said one senior government official who did not want to be named. Once a state road is declared a national highway...

IANS|Updated: Aug 21, 2019 For over 59 years, the people of Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK), including Gilgit-Baltistan (GB), were not aware of a secret agreement which decided the political contours and governance of the territory where they have been living.  Now the exiled leaders of PoK and GB are feeling the biggest betrayal at the hands of Islamabad which came through the secret 'Karachi Agreement' allegedly signed between three parties in 1949.  The secret agreement, carrying 'forged signatures' of founder President of PoK, Sardar Ibrahim Khan, Chief of Jammu Kashmir Muslim Conference Chaudhary Ghulam Abbas and key representative of the Pakistan government Mushtak Gurmani, facilitated the forcible occupation of Gilgit-Baltistan by deceit, revealed Nasir Aziz Khan, exiled leader and chief spokesperson of United Kashmir People's National Party (UKPNP), a prominent political outfit in GB.  Haunted by Pakistan's spy agency Inter-Services Int...