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Business Line  Dated : November 22, 2019 By: Indra Shekhar Singh, Prabhakar Rao Quality seeds are India’s lifeline. Farming, food and the livelihood of over 60 per cent of the Indian population depend on them. A failed harvest has the potential to curtail our GDP and force millions of Indians into poverty and hunger until the next harvest. Overall, India depends on seeds to sustain life. The government is currently in the process of bringing a new Seed Bill in the winter session of parliament, which aims to ensure that farmers get the highest quality seeds, while the seed industry also experiences an ‘ease-of-doing-business’. It aims to foster competition by updating the Seed Act 1966 and Seed Rules 1968. Seed Act 1966 Farmers' interests Price control Duration of registration After the ‘Green Revolution’, India was quick to introduce the Seed Act 1966 as the first act to govern matters of seed and seed quality. It was modelled on the US legislation and ai

Business Line Dated: November 21, 2019 By: Richa Mishra As India seeks greater influence in global policy-making, an understaffed foreign service needs to be reshaped Till about the early eighties, the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) was perceived to be the more desirable service than the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). Then the trend changed and IAS outshone IFS. Today, once again, career diplomats are grabbing the spotlight. Take the recent Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Summit where the Ministry of External Affairs stole the show. Has it got to do with Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, the Indian diplomat turned politician serving as the current Minister of External Affairs? Or is it because Prime Minister Narendra Modi is so clued into international affairs? Public policy commentator Aashish Chandorkar feels that IFS has traditionally been a relationship-management field force, with limited lobbying or Brand India-building mandate. “In the last few years, the foc

Money Control be a pro Dated : November 23, 2019 In a staggering rise in bank fraud cases, India’s PSU banks have reported misappropriation of funds to the tune of Rs 95,760 crore in the first half of the current fiscal year (2019-20) with the number of cases reaching 5,743. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman informed the parliament in a written reply to a Rajya Sabha question. The amount involved is higher than the cumulative amount in the past five years, according to the finance ministry. Watch this video to know about which banks have reported the highest number of fraud cases and what is the government doing to prevent such cases. Watch the video to know more. Get access to India's fastest growing financial subscriptions service Moneycontrol Pro for as little as Rs 599 for first year. Use the code "GETPRO". Moneycontrol Pro offers you all the information you need for wealth creation including actionable investment ideas, independent research and i

BBC MONITORING Date; November 23, 2019 A massive purge of pro-Islamic State (IS) accounts, channels and groups on the messaging app Telegram has resulted in serious disruption to the group's propaganda distribution. Europol claimed credit for the action in  a press release on 22 November  which said "a significant portion of key actors within the IS network on Telegram" had been "pushed away from the platform" as a result of a concentrated day of action during which terrorist content had been referred to Telegram and other online platforms. The statement gave no statistics for the action, but Telegram itself said 2,096 "terrorist accounts and bots" had been taken down on 22 November, accounting for almost a quarter of the takedowns to date this month.  That number was lower than a similar spike in takedowns around a year ago when 3,276 accounts and bots were  disabled in a single day on 6 December 2018 , according to Telegram's stati