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THE INDIAN EXPRESS JULY 26, 20202 The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has signed an agreement for extending a $400-million currency swap facility to Sri Lanka to boost the foreign reserves and ensure financial stability of the country, which is badly hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Indian High Commission in Colombo said the currency swap arrangement will remain available till November 2022. Sri Lanka in April said it was set to enter into an agreement with the RBI for a currency swap worth $400 million under the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) framework. Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa had made an additional request to India for a special $1.1 billion currency swap facility in May. “Reserve Bank of India signs document for $400 million currency swap facility to Sri Lanka till Nov 2022,” the Indian Mission tweeted. “After debt repayment rescheduling discussions yesterday, this development is another example of India’s strong commitment to w

THE TATVA JULY 24, 2020 A UN report on terrorism has warned that there are “significant numbers” of ISIS terrorists in Kerala and Karnataka, noting that the al-Qaida in the Indian Subcontinent terror group, which reportedly has between 150 and 200 militants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar, is planning attacks in the region. The 26th report of the Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team concerning ISIS, al-Qaida and associated individuals and entities said that the al-Qaida in the Indian Subcontinent (A QIS ) operates under the Taliban umbrella from Nimruz, Helmand and Kandahar provinces of Afghanistan. “The group reportedly has between 150 and 200 members from Bangladesh, India, Myanmar and Pakistan. The current leader of AQIS is Osama Mahmood, who succeeded the late Asim Umar AQIS is reportedly planning retaliation operations in the region to avenge the death of its former leader,” it said. According to the report, one member state reported th

EFSAS COMMENTARY JULY 24, 2020 Reports on the independent Myanmar-centric news website The Irrawaddy recently brought to light the seizure on 23 June of a large consignment of Chinese-made weapons in Mae Sot district on the Thai side of the Myanmar-Thailand border. While preliminary investigations have suggested that the weapons may have been destined for insurgent groups in Myanmar, the development has nonetheless raised antennae within security circles in New Delhi. It has also reignited the serious questions that had existed for long about the scope and depth of China’s support to terrorist groups in the region in pursuit of its policy of what a Thailand-based organization termed “diplo-terrorism”. A joint task force of the Thai military and police carried out a raid on a house in Mae Tao in Mae Sot district, which in recent years has emerged as a hotbed of insurgents of all ideological persuasions and a preferred staging area for the transportation of arms and ammunitio

BUSINESS STANDARD JULY 24, 2020 The move to dilute the new bankruptcy law caused disagreements between the government and the central bank, former Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor Urjit Patel says in his book Overdraft: Saving the Indian Saver, released on Friday. Patel, who headed the RBI between September 2016 and his sudden resignation in December 2018, says the government seemed to lose enthusiasm for the legislation in the middle of the year he left the central bank. The rift centred around a February 2018 circular issued by the RBI, which forced banks to immediately classify borrowers as defaulters when they delayed repayments, barred defaulting company founders from trying to buy back their firms during insolvency auctions, and push them into bankruptcy if a resolution timeline wasn’t met. In a chapter titled “The Empire Strikes Back”, Patel writes the disposition with respect to the insolvency law or, more generally, in the conviction in the pathway, per

THE INDIAN EXPRESS JULY 25, 2020 “Build platforms, not products” has been the mantra for the last two decades. Amazon started by selling books but became a profitable behemoth by creating the e-commerce platform called Amazon Marketplace. The most valuable companies today are platforms for search, social interaction, advertising, insurance, travel, real estate, etc. Fundamentally, these platforms are technology layers that leverage the internet to bring together producers, resellers and consumers, reducing transaction costs by cutting out intermediaries. There may be multiple platforms in the game to start with, but due to network effects and the non-portability/lock-in, only a few come to dominate each space, concentrating market power in those hands. Eventually, the participants face exploitation. Uber has been accused of exploitation by its driver members; Amazon by sellers; Google, Facebook and Apple by app developers. These neo-intermediaries so position themselves tha

THE TELEGRAPH JULY 25, 2020 Eleven global firms have offered to act as ”transaction advisers” to the government for the initial public offer of Life Insurance Corporation. The 11 entities are Axis Capital, Citigroup Global Markets, CLSA, Credit Suisse Securities, Deloitte India, Edelweiss Financial Services, IDFC Securities, IIFL Securities, JM Financial, SBI Capital Markets and Yes Securities. LIC’s IPO is expected to be by far the biggest in the domestic capital markets. Some have pegged the issue size at about Rs 1 lakh crore. The insurance behemoth’s IPO is critical to achieve the ambitious divestment target of Rs 2.1 lakh crore in this financial year. “The adviser would ensure preparatory aspects of the proposed IPO and would advise and assist the government on modalities of the IPO and the timing; structuring the transaction; organising roadshows, suggesting measures to fetch optimum value and positioning of the minority sale, among others,” the government has

THE WIRE JULY 24, 2020 The decision on whether to extend the moratorium on loans till December 2020-end will be a crucial factor in determining the pace of recovery for the economy, banks and the real estate market in India, wrote Christopher Wood, global head (equity strategy) at Jefferies Financial Group, in GREED & fear — his weekly note to investors. “A critical question for the banks, the property market and indeed the economy is now whether the moratorium is extended yet again. Still until proven otherwise, investors should probably assume that the moratorium will be extended for another four months to the end of the calendar year,” Wood said. Still a negative from the government’s standpoint, Wood believes, is that such a restructuring would be outside the recently established bankruptcy process, though presumably the special circumstances of COVID-19 could be used to justify the move. Earlier this year, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had allowed banks a

THE HINDU JULY 23, 2020 It’s not difficult to discern why India’s cotton growers are keen to buy ‘illegal’ herbicide-tolerant Bt cotton seed varieties at black market rates, much to the dismay of the organised seed industry and the anti-GM groups who fear its environmental effects. The moratorium imposed in 2009 on approval of all GM crops remains, while the ground realities with respect to cotton cultivation have undergone a significant change. The demand for the unapproved HTBT cotton seeds, which arrived on the scene about four years back, has arisen in a context of the dominant Bt strain in India, BG-II (which was introduced in 2006 and accounts for most of India’s cotton acreage) falling prey to pink bollworm pest attacks in recent years. Cotton farmers have been faced with falling yields (from 500 kg/ha in 2017-18 to 443 kg/ha in 2018-19 and 486 kg/ha in 2019-20), while dealing with constant or rising costs. The HTBT cotton plant is resistant to the usage of glyphosate-ba