It is said that Vajpayee, who was also fluent in English, was the force behind uplifting Hindi to the international platform by using the language at the UN each time he delivered a speech.
Of the 11,000 kg imported between July 1 and August 9, around 90 per cent was brought in by two business groups which took advantage of the favourable reduction in tax incidence under GST, routing their imports through Korea.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author and oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Professor of Economics at Harvard University Raj Chetty have been named by the Carnegie Corporation of New York as '2020 Great Immigrants' honourees, the Corporation said in a statement on Wednesday.
Gautam Adani, who is diversifying into many businesses, saw a 48 per cent rise in his wealth to Rs 1.40 lakh crore and moved up two places in rankings to being the fourth richest Indian. Hinduja Brothers and HCL's Shiv Nadar were ranked 2nd and 3rd. Wipro's Azim Premji slipped two places to fifth place.
Since April, India has seen multiple strains of the coronanavirus sweep the nation, upending life and businesses alike. Out-of-home retail and discretionary categories such as durables, auto, fashion, lifestyle, hospitality, food services, travel, and tourism have been the worst-hit as Covid cases remain high, leaving state governments with no option but to curtail mobility and economic activity.
'Our strategy should be to 'hold the line' in the north on the Sino-Indian land frontier, but maintain and, if possible, enlarge India's current edge in the maritime south.'
'I hope that the incoming Biden-Harris Administration works with India to address some of the most profound geopolitical transboundary challenges.'
Shifting to floating rate deposits can work as an anaesthetic gel for some customers, points out Tamal Bandyopadhyay.
The report also referred to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Israel in July 2017.
The bill to nullify retrospective taxation offers a fair solution within the framework of Indian law and Parliamentary sovereignty to companies which have been subjected to such demands, Finance Secretary T V Somanathan said on Thursday. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman introduced 'The Taxation Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2021' in the Lok Sabha that seeks to withdraw tax demands made using a 2012 retrospective legislation to tax the indirect transfer of Indian assets. The Bill provides for the withdrawal of tax demand made on "indirect transfer of Indian assets if the transaction was undertaken before May 28, 2012 (i.e. the day the retrospective tax legislation came into being)."
'Those who worked with him or came to know him rated him as one of our best, with a sharp intellect, unfailing courtesy and ready wit.' Ambassador T P Sreenivasan fondly remembers Ambassador B S Prakash, wonderful human being, unusual diplomat and long-time Rediff.com columnist, who passed away into the ages on Monday, October 4, 2021.
Foreign portfolio investors (FPI) have pumped in a net sum of Rs 49,553 crore in Indian markets this month so far on back of high liquidity coupled with improving global indicators and clarity after the US presidential elections. FPIs invested Rs 44,378 crore in equities and Rs 5,175 crore in the debt segment, taking the total net investment to Rs 49,553 crore between November 3-20. In October, FPIs invested a net sum of Rs 22,033 crore.
But there are challenges, observes Tamal Bandyopadhyay.
India's sovereign credit ratings do not reflect the economy's fundamentals, the Economic Survey said on Friday and nudged the global agencies to become more transparent and less subjective in their ratings. The Economic Survey 2020-21, tabled in Parliament, said that sovereign credit ratings methodology must be amended to reflect economies' ability and willingness to pay their debt obligations, and suggested that developing economies must come together to address this bias and subjectivity inherent in sovereign credit ratings methodology. "Never in the history of sovereign credit ratings has the fifth largest economy in the world been rated as the lowest rung of the investment-grade (BBB-/Baa3). While sovereign credit ratings do not reflect the Indian economy's fundamentals, noisy, opaque and biased credit ratings damage FPI flows," the survey said.
'While the poor have little say in shaping India's intellectual or public discourse, they do have a significant role in deciding political outcomes,' points out Roshan Kishore.
I am not sure if Modi can ever act as a chowkidar, even if he wants to. But he can surely act as a thanedar, by ensuring a fast resolution of corruption cases once they come to light. Exemplary action is easier and will burnish his anti-corruption image, argues Debashis Basu.
'If there is a background of some kind of mutual understanding on how the dialogue process might develop in a mutually satisfactory manner...' 'If this understanding impacts positively on the ground situation...' 'As of now this is a heroic assumption. But it does not have to remain such.'
Santosh Patkar of Devgadh Taluka Sindhudurg district of Maharashtra is a worried man these days. Devgadh, which is known as the home to world famous Alphonso variety of mangoes, has seen an unusual drop in yields which is affecting farmers' income. Being one of the primary agricultural produce from the area, Santosh is not untouched by this somewhat rare phenomenon. He said in his own mango garden, yields have come down by a third from most trees.
The unconventional music of the Nobel Laureate might have nothing connecting Indians to it, but there is a reason he has a following here, notes T C A Srinivasa Raghavan.
The relative ranking of castes can vary across regions and localities and depends on a number of factors including control over land, wealth, and political power. Castes have often tried to 'upgrade' themselves (a process sociologists refer to as Sanskritization), and sometimes get 'downgraded'. A revealing excerpt from Upinder Singh's Ancient India: Culture Of Contradictions.
Ordering groceries, vegetables and daily essentials is just a WhatsApp away as billionaire Mukesh Ambani's e-commerce platform JioMart taps into the popular messaging app to scale up online business in its fight for dominance in the giant Indian retail market with Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart. Ambani's twin children, Akash and Isha gave a preview of the ordering at Meta's second edition of the Fuel for India event on Wednesday. A new 'tap and chat' option allows users to order groceries through WhatsApp.
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said on Friday that India and China are going through a 'particularly bad patch' in their ties because Beijing has taken a set of actions in violation of agreements for which it still doesn't have a 'credible explanation' and it is for the Chinese leadership to answer where they want to take the bilateral relationship.
Describing it as a "spectacle in Houston", the Wall Street Journal said Trump is hoping to pick up a larger share of this growing voters bloc in 2020 than he did in 2016. Trump understands the benefit of associating with Indian Americans, whose contributions are crucial to the prosperity of both nations in the 21st century, it added.
Add to it, associate sponsor companies like Unacademy, Dream11, CRed, Upstox, and Tata Motors, who pay in the range of Rs 120 crore each. Some subsidiary sponsors are also there.
In a major relief to thousands of Indian IT professionals, a federal judge in the US on Thursday blocked the enforcement of a temporary visa ban by the Trump administration on a large number of work permits, including the most sought after H-1B visas, ruling that the president exceeded his constitutional authority.
Dr Tiju Joseph, a foreign service officer who studied medicine, has set up the first public online blood donors registry in the UAE.
Analysts say the impact on Indian entities would not be immediate
Pfizer can show the FDA approval to the Indian regulator and present a case that based on whatever data submitted, the US regulator has granted a full marketing nod, says Sohini Das.
The Indian Nuclear Energy Pool, meant to insure risks from nuclear reactors, may take longer to be set up. While the idea of forming a pool was mooted earlier this year, it has reached a deadlock owing to differences among the stakeholders on certain clauses.
Various global and domestic factors had a sizable impact on the performance of the Indian markets
Despite difficult working conditions, Indians are still seeking jobs in Gulf countries
The move was "per se illegal for violating the concept of freedom of speech and expression enumerated in Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution and the right to freedom of religion guaranteed under Article 25 of the Constitution", it said.
S&P Global Ratings has forecast India's economy to shrink by 5 per cent in the current fiscal. It, however, has projected GDP growth to be 8.5 per cent in 2021-22 and 6.5 per cent in 2022-23.
Govt to play enabler not handler, India never had more decisive government: PM Modi Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday cited his dispensation's push for wide-ranging reforms, including the privatisation of Air India, to assert that the country never had a more "decisive government". Launching the Indian Space Association (ISpA), an industry body aspiring to be the voice of the country's space sector, Modi noted that fields like mining, coal, defence and space have been opened to private players, and said his government's clear policy about public sector enterprises is to open those to private industry where its presence is not required. While opening a host of sectors, the government has built a regulatory environment in which priority has been given to national interest as well as the interests of different stakeholders, he said.
In terms of viewership, the IPL even outperformed some of the pay-per-view matches of the Premier League in Britain.
Several individuals and organisations, including the US Chambers of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, have filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration's recent rules related to the H-1B visa, terming them "arbitrary" and "haphazard" regulations that will undermine high skilled immigration into America. Early this month, the Trump administration announced new restrictions on H-1B non-immigrant visa programme which it said is aimed at protecting American workers, restoring integrity and to better guarantee that H-1B petitions are approved only for qualified beneficiaries and petitioners, a move which is likely to affect thousands of Indian IT professionals.
The implication of a slowdown in the financial services sector are very different (eg, likely to affect fewer people directly, and even that affecting those at the top of the income distribution) from that of a slowdown in construction, one of the most employment intensive sectors in the Indian economy (that will affect aggregate demand much more).'
Mobile tower radiation reaching us is more than a thousand times weaker than that from the handsets we use and the Indian standards are 10 times more stringent than the global norms recommended by the World Health Organisation, points out T V Ramachandran.
'Second-class citizenship would have been meaningless to a Hindu in the Mughal empire.'
British Parliament's Petitions Committee will consider a Westminster Hall debate in the House of Commons complex on the issue of farmers protests and press freedom in India after an online petition attracted over 106,000 signatures.
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