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FirstPost September 12, 2019  By  Dinesh Unnikrishnan   Nirmala Sitharaman suggested that the millennial mindset is tuning to app-based car rental services like Ola and Uber and that is one of the major reasons for the ongoing automobile slowdown. The Ola and Uber factor may not be strong to contribute to the current state of slowdown, said an official of Maruti Suzuki India It is likely that purchasing power and consumer confidence of people have taken a hit on account of the economic slowdown Are millennials killing the traditional car market switching to Ola, Uber? No, that theory doesn’t hold water. This writer listed five reasons explaining why in a previous article. Here’s a follow-up piece to further understand why Ola and Uber aren’t the villains in this story. For beginners, this was a theory highlighted by Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. She suggested that the millennial mindset is tuning to app-based car rental service...

DailyHunt September 12, 2019 By Ayaskant Das   Army Chief General Bipin Rawat's statement on Thursday that the Army is prepared for any operation, including retrieving Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) from Pakistan if the government wants to, comes a day ahead of the Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan's plan to hold a rally in the region.Speaking to media on Thursday, General Rawat said: "All actions are decided upon by the central government. Agencies working under the government have to act in accordance with its directions and the Army remains always prepared for any kind of action. "India's aggressive stance on PoK comes amidst heightened tensions between the two nuclear-powered South Asian neighbours over the Kashmir issue."I am going to do a big 'jalsa' (rally) in Muzzafarabad on Friday 13 Sept, to send a message to the world about the continuing siege of IOJK by Indian Occupation forces; & to show the Kashmiris that Pakistan st...

The Quint September 13, 2019 By SUSHOVAN SIRCAR A total of 142 companies including ride-sharing app services, paid a total of Rs 68 crore to purchase the detailed data of 25 crore vehicles and driving licences between 2014 and 2019. The buyers also include some of the biggest public and private sector banks and insurance companies, automobile manufacturers, financial service providers. Companies like Ola Cabs, State Bank of India (SBI), HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, United India Insurance, Reliance General Insurance, Bajaj Finance bought the data from The Ministry of Road Transport & Highways’ VAHAN database, an RTI has revealed. According to a Medianama report, the ministry has been selling vehicle related data since at least 2014. While it earned Rs 25.96 crore in 2018, it has made Rs 21 crore so far in 2019. In line with its greater plan of using “data as public good”, the government has been selling, in bulk, the data of crores of vehicle-owners and driving l...

Business Standard September 12, 2019 By Namrata Acharya Agriculture Insurance Company (AIC) has entered a co-insurance agreement with three other public sector general insurance firms—New India Assurance, National Insurance and United India Insurance for Prime Minister Fasal Bima Yojna (PMFBY). Under the scheme, while AIC will use offices, manpower and rural reach of the three companies, it will offer 12.5 per cent of the premium collected to each of the three companies. This will help AIC reduce overhead cost, and give competitive advantage, said Rajeev Chaudhary, CMD (officiating), AIC. At present, AIC accounts for nearly 50 per cent of the premium collected under PMFBY. Last year, its total premium collection was about Rs 7000 crore, and this year it expects to reach Rs 14000 crore, “AIC is a lean organization, but we are very much technically sound in terms of technical expertise and robust database. However, we lack infrastructure. Our cost of managemen...

Business Standard September 12, 2019 Expressing concerns over fall in export credit, Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal on Thursday said the government will soon come out with guidelines on extending foreign exchange credit to exporters at affordable rates. "We are concerned that it (export credit) has fallen, and will come up with the contours of a vibrant programme (to address the issue) soon, which will particularly support micro, small and medium enterprises," Goyal said while addressing the meeting of the Board of Trade. The programme, more importantly, will make foreign exchange credit available to exporters at very competitive rates, he said, adding that the rates were likely to be in the sub-four per cent category. He said that the ministry was waiting for Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman to take a call on some of the issues on export credit.  The bankers are on board and "... we shall shortly be coming out with the contours that h...

The Print September 06, 2019 By MANEESH CHHIBBER A high-profile case involving the killing of four IAF personnel in Kashmir by militants, allegedly led by Yasin Malik, will finally see some movement next week after remaining stuck for almost three decades.  A day before Republic Day 1990, on the morning of 25 January, car-borne militants opened fire on a group of IAF personnel on the outskirts of Srinagar, killing Squadron Leader Ravi Khanna and three colleagues and leaving several injured. During the subsequent investigation, several eyewitnesses identified Malik, among others, as being responsible for the firing. Thirty years since, charges are yet to be framed in the case, though the CBI presented its chargesheet in November 1990, owing to a series of factors. Apart from the fact that successive governments were in back-channel talks with Malik, the separatist launched a legal bid to get the case shifted to Srinagar from Jammu.   On 26 Ap...

The Hindu September 13, 2019 By Vijaita Singh The ambitious National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID) project wants to link social media accounts to the huge database of records related to immigration entry and exit, banking and telephone details among others. The project, initially started in 2009 with a budget of ₹2,800 crore, is an online database for collating scattered pieces of information and putting them on one platform. At least 10 central agencies like Intelligence Bureau (IB), Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) and others will have access to the data on a secured platform. The proposal has received resistance from the intelligence agencies, whose officials fear that linking the social media accounts to sensitive government data could expose the system to “trojan attacks.” Home Minister Amit Shah reviewed the progress of NATGRID at North Block on Thursday. The project gathered pace in 2016, when the NDA government appointed an IB officer Ashok Patn...

Business Line September 12, 2019 India has a large market to offer, and it must drive a better bargain that it has done so far. Mired in a serious industrial downturn, India has done well to secure a review of its bilateral trade pact with the 10-member ASEAN, which came into force from January 2010. As the Economic Survey 2015-16 observes, the average effect of a free trade pact is to increase overall trade by 50 per cent in four years. However, some of the beneficial effects of this rise in economic activity are negated if the trade imbalance too increases sharply. As a NITI Aayog report points out, India’s trade deficit with ASEAN doubled from $5 billion in 2011 to $10 billion in 2017, whereas its overall trade rose over the same period from $50 billion to $70 billion. In the case of ASEAN, India eliminated tariffs on about 75 per cent of 12,000 tariff lines, excluding 1,300 tariff lines and keeping 1,800 in sensitive track.  The NITI Aayog paper comes to the conc...

The Telegraph September 13, 2019 Facebook has squared off for battle against Reliance Industries’ chairman Mukesh Ambani over India’s tough data privacy regulations. On Thursday, Facebook’s vice-president for global affairs and communications Nick Clegg slammed India’s inward-looking policy of fiercely storing the repository of data gathered from its citizens within the country and stopping global corporations from mining it for profit. Clegg did not name Ambani but the object of his attack was clear. It also provided an insight into how the aspirations of Ambani’s Jio can pit it against global giants. At the Vibrant Gujarat summit in January, Ambani had come out strongly in support of the Centre’s plan to stop the outflow of India’s data to third countries. “For India to succeed in this data-driven revolution, we will have to migrate the control and ownership of Indian data back to India. In other words, Indian wealth should go back to every Indian,” Ambani had...

The Indian Express September 13, 2019 Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Thursday argued that India is in the midst of a protracted slowdown, and launched an attack on the Central government over its management of the economy. Addressing a meeting of top Congress leaders, Singh said the atmosphere in the country is one of “gloom and doom”, and that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s talk of making India a $5-trillion economy by 2024 looks like a “pipe dream”. “The dangerous thing about the present situation is that the government is complacent enough not to realise that we are in the midst of a protracted economic slowdown,” he added. Talking about the slide in GDP growth, he said his government faced a very challenging situation in 2008 because of the international financial crisis. “We faced that situation head-on and converted that crisis into an opportunity to revitalise our economy. The situation our country is facing today, whether you look at agriculture, wh...

Indian Express September 13, 2019 By Krishn Kaushik Underlining the threat posed by bio-terrorism, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh said new technologies in the battlefield are throwing up new challenges for the armed forces, and mentioned that the medical services of the armed forces are uniquely placed to tackle some of them. “I would like to underline the importance of building capabilities to deal with the menace of bio-terrorism. Bio-terrorism is a real threat today,” Singh said. “It breaks out as a contagious plague and the armed forces and its medical services have to be at the forefront of combating this menace.” Speaking at the first conference of military medicine of the member nations of the Shanghai Cooperation Group (SCO), Singh said the “ever advancing battle field technology has imposed a vast array of previously unrecognised challenges”. He said, “Newer and non-conventional formats of warfare have further added to the complexity of existing challenge...

The Indian Express September 13, 2019 By Jagdeep Singh Deep The National Investigation Agency (NIA) appeared in a special court on Thursday and submitted that the recovery of 532 kg heroin at the Attari border in June must be treated as a case of narco-terrorism. NIA’s senior prosecutor Surinder Singh said that four accused — Jasbir Singh, Alok Gupta, Sandeep Kaur and Nirbhail Singh — were produced in special NIA court and then sent to judicial custody till October 10. He said they filed their reply against Sandeep Kaur’s bail plea and also requested the court to conduct the trial under anti-terror laws. “We have already booked the other accused including kingpin Tariq Lone under terror laws. These accused also used to work for a bigger network. Jasbir Singh was the truck driver who delivered the drug consignments,” Surinder Singh said. He also said that the customs department booked the accused under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act, but ...

Big News Network September 12, 2019 Despite a spirited performance at the Asia Pacific Joint Group meeting, Pakistan is expecting a poor rating and is increasing its diplomatic outreach to other FATF members, a Pakistani official who was part of the negotiations said on condition of strict anonymity. Informed sources do not feel confident that the Financial Action Task Force's Reviewer Group, the APJG (Asia Pacific Joint Group) which met in Bangkok this week, is convinced even moderately, given that the APG (Asia Pacific Group) MER (Mutual Evaluation Report) from August 18-23, 2019 in Canberra had placed Pakistan on its Enhanced Follow Up. A sceptical official who did not wish to be named said "Despite having done so much of hard work including answering 127 questions of APJG and giving clear written replies based on statistics, two Indian members of the 16-member multi-nation Group posed twisted and complex questions on every one of 27 items. The Group needs t...

Big News Network September 13, 2019 Media reports quoting a Pakistan official indicate that Pakistan's evaluation by the Asia Pacific Joint Group in Bangkok this week did not match up to its expectations. The unidentified official indicated that the group asked complex questions and did not seem to be satisfied. FATF had placed Pakistan on its Gray List in June 2018, giving it a 15-month action plan to complete implementation of a 27-point action plan, failing which the country could be placed in the Black List. In August 2019, a subsidiary body of FATF, the Asia Pacific Group placed Pakistan in the Enhanced Follow Up List for failure to meet its standards. On 40 compliance parameters, Pakistan was non-compliant on 30. On 11 effectiveness parameters, Pakistan was adjudged as Low on 10. Pakistan has been under the FATF radar for its complicity towards terror groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), Haqqani Network, among others. In addition, pro...

NDTV September 13, 2019 International Monetary Fund or IMF on Thursday said that India's economic growth is "much weaker" than expected due to corporate and environmental regulatory uncertainty and "lingering weakness" in some non-bank financial companies. "Again, we will have a fresh set of numbers coming up, but the recent economic growth in India is much weaker than expected, mainly due to corporate and environmental regulatory uncertainty and lingering weakness in some non-bank financial companies and risks to the outlook are tilted to the downside, as we like to say," IMF spokesman Gerry Rice told reporters at a news conference. The economic growth slowed to a seven-year low to 5 per cent in April to June quarter from 8 per cent a year ago, as per the government data. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has cut its projection for India's economic growth by 0.3 percentage points to 7 per cent for the fiscal year 2019-20 ow...

News 18 September 12, 2019 Two US lawmakers have expressed concerns over the human rights situation in Kashmir, and urged Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to press India to immediately end the communication blockade and release those who have been detained. In a letter to Pompeo dated September 11, Pramila Jayapal, the first and the only Indian-American Congresswoman in the House of Representatives, and Congressman James P McGovern said the international media and independent human rights observers must immediately be allowed into Jammu and Kashmir to investigate reports of abuse. "We urge you to work across the Administration to press the Indian Government to immediately end its communications blackout of Kashmir, expedite the process of reviewing and releasing individuals 'preventatively' detained, ensure hospitals have access to life-saving medicines and protect the rights of the Kashmiri people to freedom of assembly and worship," reads the letter. ...