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Scroll.in Date: Aug 07, 2020 letters@scroll.in,  Pharmaceutical company Zydus Cadila on Wednesday said its coronavirus vaccine candidate was found to be safe, immunogenic, and well-tolerated in an early-stage human trial. In a regulatory filing, the firm said it will start Phase II trials in over 1,000 healthy adult volunteers from Thursday to test its effectiveness against the infection. “The Phase I dosing to establish the safety of ZyCoV-D is an important milestone,” Zydus Cadila chairperson Pankaj R Patel said. “All the subjects in Phase I clinical trial were closely monitored in a clinical pharmacological unit for 24 hours post dosing for safety and for 7 days thereafter and vaccine was found to be very safe. We now begin the Phase II clinical trials and look forward to evaluating the safety and immunogenicity of the vaccine in a larger population.” The seven-day safety of the vaccine candidate in volunteers enrolled in the Phase I trial, who were administered doses since July...

Money Control  Date: Aug 07, 2020 PTI,  The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has tweaked priority sector lending (PSL) norms to include loans to startups. Borrowing limits for the renewable energy sectors-- solar power and compressed bio-gas plants-- are also being raised by the central bank. In his speech following the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meet, RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das said: "With a view to aligning the guidelines with emerging national priorities and bring sharper focus on inclusive development, the Priority Sector Lending (PSL) guidelines have been reviewed." The central bank has also decided to put in place an incentive framework for banks in order to address the regional disparities in the flow of priority sector credit. Under the revised PSL norms, the RBI has also increased the targets for lending to 'Small and Marginal Farmers' and 'Weaker Sections'. "While higher weightage will be assigned for incremental priority sector credit in the ...

Opinion  Date: Aug 07, 2020 Mihir Sharma,  This week, an Indian prime minister, dressed like a priest-king in a saffron scarf, a silver crown and a lockdown-lengthened beard, performed a sacred ritual in the ancient capital of Ayodhya. Narendra Modi thus founded a new Hindu temple on a site where, for hundreds of years, a mosque had stood. After decades of legal warfare and mob violence, Hindu nationalists have now effectively reclaimed the land where they believe Lord Rama was born. The state-sponsored pageantry of the moment, however, proclaimed their greater victory: the transformation of India from a secular-nationalist republic into an ethno-nationalist state. No mere democratic election could match the elation of this moment, as far as the Hindu revivalists were concerned; theirs was a victory not over politicians but over history itself. Twenty, even ten years ago, there would have been agonising in the media and in public over an Indian prime minister presiding over su...

The Telegraph  Date: Aug 07, 2020 PTI,  Pakistan’s top economic body on Wednesday approved its costliest project to date as part of the multibillion-dollar China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) agreement, giving the go-ahead for a $6.8 billion project to upgrade its railway lines, the government said. CPEC has seen Beijing pledge over $60 billion for infrastructure projects in Pakistan, central to China’s wider Belt and Road Initiative. The Executive Committee of the National Economic Council approved the railway project, known as Mainline-1 , on a cost-sharing basis between Islamabad and Beijing, Pakistan’s finance division said in a statement. Under the project, Pakistan’s existing 2,655km railway tracks will be upgraded to allow trains to move up to 165km per hour while the line capacity will increase from 34 to over 150 trains each way per day. “The execution of the project shall be in 3 packages and in order to avoid commitment charges, the loan amount for each pac...

Financial Express  Date: Aug 07, 2020 PTI,  A new infectious disease caused by a tick-borne virus has killed seven people and infected 60 others in China, official media here reported on Wednesday, warning about the possibility of its human-to-human transmission. More than 37 people in East China’s Jiangsu Province contracted with the SFTS Virus in the first half of the year. Later, 23 people were found to have been infected in East China’s Anhui province, state-run Global Times quoted media reports. A woman from Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu, who suffered from the virus showed onset of symptoms such as fever, coughing. Doctors found a decline of leukocyte, blood platelet inside of her body. After a month of treatment, she was discharged from the hospital. At least seven people have died in Anhui and East China’s Zhejiang province due to the virus, the report said. SFTS Virus is not a new virus. China has isolated pathogen of the virus in 2011, and it belongs to t...

The Telegraph  Date: Aug 07, 2020 PTI,  Bharti Airtel and Amazon Web Services have joined hands to develop the telecom firm’s cloud business, allowing it to offer a comprehensive set of solutions to large businesses and small and medium enterprises (SME) in India.  Airtel has over 2,500 large companies as its clients and more than a million emerging businesses with its product portfolio, including Airtel Cloud, a multi-cloud product and solutions business.  “The strategic collaboration between Airtel and AWS will offer a suite of cloud solutions to drive the digital transformation of businesses in India,” Harmeen Mehta, chief information officer and head –— cloud and security business, Bharti Airtel, said in a virtual conference. Under the partnership, “Airtel Cloud will build an AWS Cloud Practice supported by AWS Professional Services, as well as develop differentiated Airtel Cloud products and capabilities, leveraging AWS services, Airtel’s data centre capabilitie...

The Telegraph Date: Aug 07, 2020 PTI,  Telecom operators have written to the department of telecommunications (DoT) for the early allocation of 5G spectrum so that they can start trials as early as September. The trials with different vendors are necessary as it will take six to nine months to get the relevant data and the optimum results, enabling the operators to prepare their strategy for the long delayed 5G auction. Opposition to the high base price set by the regulator and confusion over the participation of Chinese vendors have amplified the concerns of the telecom entities.  Besides, the operators have sought spectrum in three bands: 26Ghz and 24Ghz (mmWave bands), and 3.5Ghz. mmWave bands such as 26Ghz are meant for government agencies, but the operators want access to them because of their efficiency and have sought a base price for the 26Ghz spectrum.  S.P. Kochar, the newly appointed director-general of the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), has sa...

Sustainable Developments Goals  Date: Aug 06, 2020 PTI,  The world is witnessing a major epidemic caused by the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) as termed by the World Health Organization (WHO). Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by SARS-CoV-2, initially came to attention in a series of patients with pneumonia of unknown etiology in the Hubei province of China and subsequently spread to many other regions in the world. While there are several hypotheses about the origin of 2019-nCoV, its origin, the source of its release, and whether the release was intentional or accidental, is captivating the attention of scientists and security establishments across the world. Is the Coronavirus Disease a bio-weapon, released by the Americans in China and Iran, and in retaliation by the Chinese in Europe and the US? This question is passed off as a conspiracy theory of the most imaginative kind. It may be prudent to examine the various arguments in support of the claim that the v...

The Wire  Date: Aug 06, 2020 PTI,  The economic outlook for an evolving COVID-19 world is that a global recession is now inevitable. And the availability of credit will decide how much of the world economy will survive. In India, access to funds via foreign direct investment (FDI) has been tightened. In a cautious attempt to avert the rising possibility of “opportunistic takeovers” by nations from which large amounts of FDI flows into the country, the Indian government has mandated that all the investments from neighbouring countries, including China, would now require government approval. This has sealed the “automatic route” for nations through which an increasing number of foreign firms and individuals had lately begun to invest. While not overtly stated, the policy change is likely in view of risks to the national interests in a scenario where viable Indian businesses would be sold to foreign Chinese interests. In a direct defence against possible hostile takeovers in an e...

The Wire  Date: Aug 06, 2020 PTI, For two decades Afghanistan has represented the centre of American strategic involvement. But with the signing of the ‘Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan‘ between the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, which is not recognised by the United States as a state and is known as the Taliban, and the US, a determined adversary became an ally overnight. Saturday’s Doha accord was the culmination of nearly eighteen months of negotiations between the Taliban political chief Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar and the US, represented by special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, by keeping the legitimately elected government of Ashraf Ghani out of the process. Through the negotiations and even right up to the signing of the peace accord, with violence being its main leverage, the Taliban refused to a ‘cease-fire’. Rather a mere seven-day “reduction in violence” forms the footing for a deal with the deadliest militant group in the world. It is what constitutes an outline fo...

The Wire Date: Aug 06, 2020 PTI,  At the ongoing Financial Action Task Force (FATF) plenary in Paris, Pakistan’s case was up for review and it was retained on the ‘grey list’ failure to fully comply with global Anti-Money Laundering/Combating Financing of Terrorism (AML/CTF) standards. Pakistan has been under FATF observation for eleven years now, having been placed on the grey list first in 2012, and subsequently again in 2018. Although the case for ‘black listing’ Pakistan for its flagrant violation of FATF standards has been strong, with support from three nations, China, Turkey and Malaysia, this has been an arduous diplomatic struggle for India. Any country under review requires only three votes to keep if off the ‘black list’ and 12 votes to take it off the grey list. In June 2018, the FATF granted Pakistan 15 months to implement an appropriate legislative framework to identify, freeze and confiscate terrorist assets. At the end of that timeframe in October 2019, a regional g...

The Wire  Date: Aug 06, 2020 PTI,  As the country’s largest company by market capitalisation, it wouldn’t be far-fetched to state that Mukesh Ambani-owned Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) has become a cornerstone of the Indian economy.  Ambani’s seven-year investment spree from 2012 to 2019, largely fuelled by his telecom gamble, single-handedly boosted the rise in private investment. As Credit Suisse  noted in October 2016 , Reliance  by itself  contributed nearly 15% of the $117 billion in investment that was made by India’s top 1,250 publicly traded companies in 2015. This analysis included capex by the Indian Railways and state-owned electricity boards as well.  For decades now, RIL has held a commanding industry position, a situation that only changed once it started expanding into the telecom and retail businesses. Until 2012, RIL was debt-free on a net basis, but since then it has witnessed a 438% increase in its gross debt. As Reliance Industr...