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The Telegraph Banks to start a campaign to popularise RuPay Debit card and UPI To promote digital payments, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Saturday said no MDR charges will be applicable on transactions through homegrown RuPay and UPI platforms beginning January 1, 2020.  The department of revenue will soon notify RuPay and UPI as the prescribed mode of payment for digital transactions without any Merchant Discount Rate (MDR), she said after meeting CEOs of public sector banks here. Accordingly, all companies with a turnover of Rs 50 crore or more will be mandated by the revenue department to provide the facility of payment through RuPay Debit card and UPI QR code to their customers, she said.  MDR is the cost paid by a merchant to a bank for accepting payment from their customers via digital means. The merchant discount rate is expressed in percentage of the transaction amount. “I’m happy to say that the announcement whi...

The Hindu China’s third quarter GDP growth was the slowest in 27 years China will revise its historical regional GDP data under a unified accounting mechanism from early next year, the National Bureau of Statistics said, amid the continued slowdown of the world’s second largest economy. The Chinese economy grew at an annual pace of 6% in the July-September quarter, the slowest growth since 1992. The slowdown is exacerbated by the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and China. In November this year, China revised its 2018 GDP, saying the economy was 2.1% bigger than earlier estimated, revising the gross domestic product for 2018 to 91.93 trillion yuan ($13.1 trillion) from USD 12.8 trillion. The new mechanism will unify the standards and procedures for calculating national and local GDP numbers which had been calculated under different accounting methods adopted by local and national statistics authorities since 1985, state-run Xinhua news agency quoted the...

The Hindu Suhasini Haidar Diplomats say ministerial linked to Saudi ties with Islamabad to counter rival Islamic formation Pakistan will hold a ministerial meeting of the  57-member Organisation for Islamic Cooperation (OIC)  on Jammu and Kashmir in April 2020, said official media in Islamabad. The development, according to diplomats, is linked to a broader Saudi-Pakistan deal. The announcement came days after recently-appointed Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud visited Islamabad and met with the Pakistani leadership, including Prime Minister Imran Khan and Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi on December 26. “I told the Saudi Foreign Minister that the OIC must make a strong statement on India’s Citizenship Amendment Act as well as on the situation in [Jammu and Kashmir],” Mr. Qureshi said in a press conference on Sunday. According to Radio Pakistan, the officials had discussed holding the meeting of ministers of the OIC grouping of Musl...

Hindustan Times Indian police have started using facial-recognition software to screen large crowds as protests over a new religion-based citizenship law intensify, the Indian Express newspaper reported, citing people it didn’t identify.  The software, originally acquired in 2018 to find lost children, was used at a political rally for the first time on December 22, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi staunchly defended the contentious law in New Delhi, the paper said. Police in the Indian capital have started feeding footage of ongoing protests to the software to filter out “habitual protesters” and “rowdy elements,” according to the report. The report comes amid widespread allegations of police brutality during the nationwide demonstrations, in which at least 25 people have been killed, scores more injured and thousands detained, at a time when the country’s economy has slowed. Modi on Wednesday blamed the demonstrators for vandalism, saying those who were misled and cause...