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Business Standard September 20, 2019 Arindam Majumder & Arup Roychoudhury A group of ministers, led by Home Minister Amit Shah, on Thursday set the ball rolling on disinvestment of state-owned Air India. This is the second attempt of the Modi government to sell Air India after a previous attempt failed to generate any interest. Officials aware of the deliberations in a meeting of AISAM on Thursday said the agenda was to seek a formal political approval for the re-initiation of the privatisation process. “It was a very productive meeting. We are going to take all the decisions in a defined period of time. The Air India divestment process is underway,” Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri said. “The issue of debt and the expression of interest (EoI) will be taken up in the next meeting of AISAM,” the official quoted earlier said. The Committee of Secretaries has proposed that the government fully quit the carrier as a 24 per cent holding of the government ...

Business Standard September 20, 2019 Anup Roy The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Thursday said banks can set their own policies regarding concurrent audits but should cover basic minimum areas prescribed by the central bank. Earlier, the central bank used to formulate rules for concurrent audits, which are done to shorten the interval between a transaction and its audit. The idea is to develop sound internal accounting, minimising errors, and preventing frauds. However, with the rise of many kinds of banks, a common programme for all cannot be set, the RBI said. Rather, “the scope of work to be entrusted to concurrent auditors, coverage of business/branches, etc is left to the discretion of the head of internal audit of banks,” with prior approval of the audit committee or management committee of the bank. However, the minimum areas to be covered would include cash transactions, including physical verification of cash, loans, and advances such as physical verifica...

Foreign Affairs Pratap Bhanu Mehta September 20, 2019 In a sweeping and controversial move on August 5, India transformed its relationship to the disputed territory of Kashmir. The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi chose to eliminate Article 370 of the Indian constitution, which for seven decades had granted Kashmir a special status within India. The decision effectively quashed any lingering Kashmiri hopes for self-determination and bound Kashmir more closely to India, reducing it from a state to a “union territory” administered directly from New Delhi. Anticipating outrage and protest, the Indian government placed the Kashmir Valley—where most of the state’s Muslim-majority population lives—under lockdown, arresting local politicians, cutting off communications, limiting movement, and flooding Kashmir with troops.  Though it took many by surprise, the decision to abrogate Article 370 didn’t come out of nowhere. Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had...

The New York Times September 20, 2019 Jennifer Valetino-DeVries The F.B.I. has used secret subpoenas to obtain personal data from far more companies than previously disclosed, newly released documents show. The requests, which the F.B.I. says are critical to its counter terrorism efforts, have raised privacy concerns for years but have been associated mainly with tech companies. Now, records show how far beyond Silicon Valley the practice extends — encompassing scores of banks, credit agencies, cellphone carriers and even universities. The demands can scoop up a variety of information, including usernames, locations, IP addresses and records of purchases. They don’t require a judge’s approval and usually come with a gag order, leaving them shrouded in secrecy. Fewer than 20 entities, most of them tech companies, have ever revealed that they’ve received the subpoenas, known as national security letters. The documents, obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation ...

Bloomberg Quint Opinion September 20, 2019 Ira Duggal The Indian government on Friday announced its most decisive step yet in combating a five-quarter slowdown, which has taken the country’s gross domestic product growth rate down from 8 percent to a six-year low of 5 percent. After initially relying on monetary policy and improved credit flow as ways to push up GDP growth, the government appears to have finally come around to the view that a fiscal push was essential to boost growth and sentiment. Ceteris Paribus, the revenue loss of Rs 1.45 lakh crore estimated by the government will push up the fiscal deficit to near about 4 percent. However, should there be some spending cuts or additional revenue generated through asset sales, the impact on the fiscal deficit could be lower. Growth Gains: Banking On Trickle Down What the government is attempting is fiscal pump-priming of the economy, undertaken last in India after the global financial crisis. The difference...

Joseph Cox September 17, 2019 Repo men are passively scanning and uploading the locations of every car they drive by into DRN, a surveillance database of 9 billion license plate scans accessible by private investigators. In just a few taps and clicks, the tool showed where a car had been seen throughout the U.S. A private investigator source had access to a powerful system used by their industry, repossession agents, and insurance companies. Armed with just a car's plate number, the tool—fed by a network of private cameras spread across the country—provides users a list of all the times that car has been spotted. I gave the private investigator, who offered to demonstrate the capability, a plate of someone who consented to be tracked. The results popped up: dozens of sightings, spanning years. The system could see photos of the car parked outside the owner's house; the car in another state as its driver went to visit family; and the car parked in other spots in ...

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