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 Hindustan Times October 07, 2020 The Goods and Services Tax (GST) Council on Monday could not resolve the vexed compensation cess issue and deferred the matter for the next meeting that will be held on October 12. However, the Council took some other decisions that will have an impact on businesses. Consultancy firm EY India summarises the other decisions taken by the Council on Monday. 1. Levy of GST compensation cess to be extended beyond the transition period of five years, for such period as may be required to meet the revenue gap. 2. Allowing taxpayers having turnover of less than Rs 5 crore to file GST returns on a quarterly basis with monthly payment with effect from January 1, 2021. Such persons shall have an option to pay 35% of their net cash tax liability of the previous quarter using an auto-generated challan for the first two months of the quarter. 3. The due date of furnishing quarterly GST returns (GSTR-1) to be changed to 13 of the succeeding month with effect from...

 The Indian Express October 06, 2020 A resurgent India’s military capability and combat preparedness to deal with any sort of conflict and eventuality has taken centre-stage in the backdrop of rapidly evolving security dimensions at the regional and global front. While adhering to the longstanding principle of “peace with strength”, the Indian Armed Forces have not shied away from showing their absolute assertiveness in safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity in times of conflict. Indian Armed Forces, in possession of a huge inventory of state-of-the-art, high-end military platforms and systems, have also deployed BrahMos, the world’s most formidable, uniquely versatile tactical weapon having outstanding anti-ship and land-attack capability. The precision attack missile has been deployed along India’s strategic positions, rendering unprecedented strength to the country’s defence forces to resolutely deal with any kind of aggressive military posturing by an adver...

The Telegraph,  October 09, 2020 The World Bank expects India’s economy to contract 9.6 per cent in the current fiscal and to rebound to a 5.4 per cent growth in 2021-22 assuming that Covid-related restrictions will be completely lifted by 2022. A weak global scenario and a tough domestic environment mean both Indian imports and exports will be affected this year. India needs to continue with critical reforms to reverse the sudden and steep impacts of Covid-19 on its economy, the World Bank said in its twice-a-year-regional update. Millions of people in South Asia are being pushed into extreme poverty as the region,  where a quarter of humanity lives, suffers its worst-ever recession, the World Bank said. The latest South Asia Economic Focus forecasts a sharper-than-expected economic slump across the region, with regional growth expected to contract 7.7 percent in 2020, after topping 6 per cent annually in the past five years. Regional growth is likely to rebound to 4.5 per ce...

 The Wire,  October 09, 2020 New Delhi: The Indian Medical Association on Thursday questioned the scientific basis of the government’s recently released protocol based on Ayurveda and yoga for the prevention as well as treatment of asymptomatic and mild patients of COVID-19. Union health minister Harsh Vardhan on Tuesday released a protocol for the clinical management of COVID-19, that lists dietary measures, yoga and ayurvedic herbs and formulations such as Ashwagandha and AYUSH-64 for prevention of coronavirus infection and treatment of mild and asymptomatic cases. “Whether the proponents of this claim and his Ministry are prepared to subject themselves as volunteers to an independent prospective double-blind control study in prevention and treatment of COVID? How many of his ministerial colleagues have so far made the informed choice of getting treated under these protocols?” the IMA asked. “What is stopping him from handing over COVID care and control to AYUSH ministry? IM...

Financial Express October 06, 2020 "Solar PV manufacturing is one of the strategic sectors announced by the government as part of the post-COVID-19 Aatmanirbhar Bharat recovery initiative. Efforts are underway to make India a global hub for solar PV manufacturing," Kant said. Solar photovoltaic (PV) manufacturing is one of the strategic sectors announced by the government and India has the opportunity to be the global hub for this, Niti Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant said on Tuesday.  Addressing a virtual conference on ‘India PV Edge 2020: Re-Define What is Possible’, Kant said the government is confident of building competence, capabilities and capacities, especially in the sunrise areas of growth.“Solar PV manufacturing is one of the strategic sectors announced by the government as part of the post-COVID-19 Aatmanirbhar Bharat recovery initiative. Efforts are underway to make India a global hub for solar PV manufacturing,” he said. The Niti Aayog CEO further said India with its hug...

The Wire,  October 09, 2020 New Delhi: During his talks with the visiting head of Afghanistan’s peace council Abdullah Abdullah, Prime Minister Narendra Modi reiterated India’s support to the Afghan government’s efforts to initiate intra-Afghan talks. Chairman of Afghanistan’s High Council for National Reconciliation, Abdullah, who is on a five-day visit to India, met with the Indian prime minister on Thursday. India’s national security advisor Ajit Doval hosted a dinner for Abdullah on Wednesday night. External affairs minister S. Jaishankar will call on the visiting Afghan leader on Friday. According to a read-out issued by the Ministry of External Affairs, the Indian prime miniter “reiterated India’s commitment towards sustainable peace and prosperity in Afghanistan and welcomed efforts towards a comprehensive and permanent ceasefire in Afghanistan”. On September 12, the Afghan government and the Taliban officially began the intra-Afghan talks in Qatar’s capital city, Doha. Howe...

The Wire,  October 09, 2020 Regulators around the world haven’t yet fully woken up to the deleterious impact of Big Data oligopolies who already threaten to dominate and guide consumer behaviour at every level. These days, a casual e-mail conversation with a friend on your colour and clothing preferences comes back at you in the form of an offer from an online retailer at 30% discount! This is common now. In India, we are seeing the real possibility of a big telecom giant like Reliance Jio working via strategic partnerships with the likes of Facebook and Google to have near-total control over intimate data on 500-600 million Indian consumers. A US House of Representatives panel investigated big technology monopolies like Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook for 15 months on how they abused their monopoly power and the panel has decided to make sweeping changes to anti-trust laws not seen in fifty years. This is significant because it will directly impact their activities in other par...

The Wire,  October 09, 2020 State surveillance has always posed the biggest threat to a citizen’s right to privacy. The 1933 Reichstag Fire Decree that compromised the privacy of citizens in Nazi Germany, as well as the 2013 Snowden revelations about mass surveillance in the US, are only a few examples. Any gathering of intelligence by the state for legal investigations, even if revealed by third parties such as telecom operators or forensic analysts, is strictly classified. However, a new trend in the reportage of the Sushant Singh Rajput and Hathras cases by the right-wing Indian media puts a question mark on the classified status of legal evidence. Pro-government media channels and platforms are now directly obtaining classified evidence from investigating agencies and the police. This illegal supply of evidence that is then broadcast on television and circulated on social media is one of the many dangerous turns that the Indian news media has taken. On October 2, the audio clip...

 First Post  October 05, 2020 Professor Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan wears many hats. She is the author of four books (co-author/editor of five more) including one on Chinese military strategy, her research articles appear in edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals, she has words in publications such as  Wall Street Journal ,  Times of India ,  Hindustan Times  etc., and she is the senior Asia defence writer for  The Diplomat  where she tackles, among other things, Asian military and strategic issues. Rajagopalan is a Distinguished Fellow and Head of the Nuclear and Space Policy Initiative at ORF. Rajagopalan, who also had a five-year stint at the National Security Council Secretariat as assistant director, took some questions from  Firstpost  on the Sino-Indian border dispute, the current impasse and the road ahead. In a recent podcast, Ashley Tellis linked India’s decision of reading down Article 370 to China’s aggression at the bord...

 he Indian Express October 06,2020 Few of Delhi’s bilateral relations get as much attention as its growing engagement with Washington and none of its many global groupings generate as much political heat as the so-called Quad — the quadrilateral framework that brings India together with the US and its Asian allies, Japan and Australia. The Quad, whose foreign ministers are meeting today in Tokyo could certainly emerge, at some point in the future, as a critical element not only for India’s foreign and security policy but also a definitive moment in the evolution of post-War Asian economic and security architectures. Meanwhile, confusion reigns on what the Quad is and its future in India’s international relations. Sustaining that confusion is the proposition that India is abandoning its “sacred” tradition of non-alignment in favour of a military alliance with the US in order to counter the China threat. Although External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar affirmed that India will not joi...

Tech Crunch,  October 08, 2020 Dr Lal PathLabs, one of the largest lab testing companies in India, left a huge cache of patient data on a public server for months, TechCrunch has learned. The lab testing giant, headquartered in New Delhi, serves some 70,000 patients a day, and quickly became a major player in testing patients for COVID-19 after winning approval from the Indian government. But the company was storing hundreds of large spreadsheets packed with sensitive patient data in a storage bucket, hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), without a password, allowing anyone to access the data inside. Australia-based security expert Sami Toivonen found the exposed data and reported it to Dr Lal PathLabs in September. The company quickly shut down access to the bucket but the company did not reply, Toivonen told TechCrunch. It’s not known how long the bucket was exposed. Toivonen said the exposed data amounted to millions of individual patient bookings. A redacted section of the sprea...

The Economic Times,  October 09, 2020 New Delhi: Vaccine maker Bharat Biotech has approached the drug regulatory authority and sought permission to conduct phase III clinical trials of its indigenous Covid-19 vaccine Covaxin. The subject expert committee, which discussed the matter in a meeting held on October 5, has asked the Hyderabad-based company to resubmit the protocol. “After detailed deliberation the committee opined that the design of the phase III study is in principle satisfactory except for clarification on definition of asymptomatic, etc,” said the minutes of the meeting. “However, the study should be initiated with appropriate dose identified from the phase II safety & immunogenicity data. Accordingly, the firm should submit safety & immunogenicity data from phase II trial for consideration.” The company had approached the drug controller’s office and presented its phase III clinical trial protocol along with interim data of phase I and II clinical trials. “Th...

Vision Times, October 07, 2020 A defector from China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) recently provided American intelligence agencies with information regarding the CCP’s bioweapons programs. The Asian nation is believed to be actively developing biological weapons, thereby posing a threat to global security.   China and bioweapons “The defector escaped from China and traveled to Europe, where he is under the protection of a European government security service… The PLA defector believes that Chinese intelligence has penetrated the U.S. government and is therefore wary of cooperating with the CIA and other Western spy agencies,” according to the  Washington Times. However, the person has provided some information about Chinese bioweapons to the U.S. Recently, a researcher from China, Dr. Yusen Zhou, was found dead under mysterious circumstances. Zhou was the team leader at the State Key Laboratory of Pathogen and Biosecurity, Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemi...

The Indian Express,  October 08, 2020 At the centre of the storm around the Narcotics Control Bureau’s investigation into the alleged drug trafficking in connection with actor Rhea Chakraborty — given bail by Bombay High Court on October 7 — following the death of actor Sushant Singh Rajput and what has now become an ‘inquiry’ aimed at “uprooting the drug citadel in Bollywood”, is a plant that goes by many names: cannabis, hemp, marijuana or pot. As potent as various parts of its anatomy may be, not all of them amount to criminality under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act, 1985. What is the cannabis plant? According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), cannabis is a generic term used to denote the several psychoactive preparations of the plant Cannabis sativa. The major psychoactive constituent in cannabis is Delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). The Mexican name ‘marijuana‘ is frequently used in referring to cannabis leaves or other crude plant material in...

The Indian Express,  October 09, 2020 Confident that the armed forces can meet a two-front threat should it arise, the military brass say there’s no evidence yet of China and Pakistan being in collusion while the Ladakh standoff continues. Yet the security establishment has been keeping an eagle eye because there’s increasing intelligence on the Chinese helping Pakistan improve its military infrastructure, especially in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. This, sources said, suggests that their militaries are attempting “better integration”. Late last month, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), sources said, provided intelligence on China helping Pakistan set up a new missile system in PoK. The input, sources said, conveyed that PLA and Pakistan Army personnel were carrying out construction work for installation of a surface-to-air missile (SAM) system near Lasadanna Dhok in PoK. It said approximately 130 Pakistan Army personnel and 25-40 civilians were working at the construction sit...