In 2025 alone, at least 50 suicides linked to online gambling losses have been reported across India. According to FIRs, the victims were addicted to betting, largely driven by cricket, rummy and poker.
BRIC countries -- Brazil, Russia, India and China -- are expected to contribute one-third of the world's GDP increment in 2015, by which time their total economy will surpass America, according to a leading Chinese think tank.
India's proposal to impose retaliatory import duty on certain US products in response to American tariffs on steel and aluminium could cast a shadow over ongoing negotiations for a trade agreement between the two countries, think tank GTRI said on Tuesday. The Global Trade Research Initiative (GTRI) said that if the US engages in consultations with India on the matter or withdraws tariffs, a resolution may be reached.
The report put India's 'stored' nuclear warheads at 172 in January this year while the number for Pakistan was 170.
India, the world's third largest oil consuming and importing nation, bought crude oil worth 49 billion euros from Russia in the third year of Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, a global think tank said. India, which has traditionally sourced its oil from the Middle East, began importing a large volume of oil from Russia soon after the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
India, the world's third largest oil consuming and importing nation, spent 112.5 billion euro (about Rs 1.5 lakh crore) on buying crude oil from Russia since the start of the Ukraine war, a European think tank said on Thursday. The Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) released a report on payments to Russia for fossil fuels since February 24, 2022. "According to our estimates, since the beginning of the war, Russia earned EUR 835 billion in revenue from fossil fuel exports," it said.
'Illegal gambling operators are systematically exploiting India's advertising and payment infrastructure, siphoning off crores of rupees from outside the country.'
For the first time, the Data Security Council of India assembled a joint task force to source threat intelligence at the origin and ensure coordinated action across the cybersecurity spectrum.
Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari on Tuesday favoured giving a majority 51 per cent stake to foreign partners in joint ventures for building tunnels and detailed project reports to improve work quality. Gadkari said providing a majority stake to a foreign partner in the joint venture is necessary to ensure that only serious and technically qualified players bid for tunnel projects.
'Currently, it takes between two and three years to formulate the request for proposal for procuring specific military equipment for the armed forces. It should not be this way.'
The commerce ministry is working on different scenarios to assess the possible fallout of reciprocal tariffs to be imposed by the US administration on April 2 on its key trading partners including India, sources said. US President Donald Trump has said that April 2 will be 'Liberation Day' as he plans to announce tariffs or import duties to bring down America's trade deficit, and promote the country's manufacturing.
The government on Tuesday announced setting up of hubs to promote exports through e-commerce medium in public-private-partnership (PPP) mode and initially 10-15 hubs will be established. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said that these hubs, under a seamless regulatory and logistic framework, will facilitate trade and export-related services under one roof. "To enable MSMEs (micro, small and medium enterprises) and traditional artisans to sell their products in international markets, e-commerce export hubs will be set up in PPP mode," she said.
The government has revised gold import data, bringing down numbers for November by $5 billion to $9.84 billion, possibly to rectify double accounting of inbound shipments. According to revised data of the commerce ministry arm Directorate General of Commercial Intelligence and Statistics (DGCIS), gold import numbers have been slashed since April 2024, revealing excess imports of about $11.7 billion during the first eight months of 2024-25.
'Each state is unique, but when it comes to finance, the fundamentals cannot be different.'
However, as of now, container availability has not been seen as an issue as adequate empties are available. The Red Sea strait is vital for 30 per cent of global container traffic and 12 per cent of global trade.
Nearly Rs 3,400 crore (Rs 34 billion) in cash and other items were seized in the elections in 2022-2023, an increase of 835 per cent over 2017-2018.
The outcome of the general elections, the Morgan Stanley note says, has enough firepower to sway the markets on either side.
As per OECD's September estimates, global growth was to be 3 per cent this year and 3.6 per cent in 2016.
India, Asia's third-largest economy, is likely to grow 5.3 per cent in 2013, the OECD said, lower than the November forecast of 5.9 per cent.
According to the World Bank, economic growth in middle-income countries, including India, is not accelerating. 'In fact, it is slowing down as incomes increase, with the trend becoming more pronounced each decade.'
'Trump has no more elections to fight and his soaring ambition, which is no secret, will be to carve out a presidential legacy that outshines by far all his mediocre predecessors.' 'Trump's turnaround on the H-1B visa debate shows that he can take tough decisions and there are no holy cows in his domain,' asserts Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.
Economic think-tank NCAER on Thursday revised downwards economic growth projection to 7.8 per cent from its earlier estimate of 9 per cent for the current fiscal and said global slowdown and rise in inflation will have an adverse impact on the growth of Indian economy.
India's export of fuels like diesel to the European Union jumped 58 per cent in the first three quarters of 2024, with a bulk of them likely coming from refining discounted Russian oil, according to a monthly tracker report. The EU/G7 countries in December 2022 introduced a price cap and an embargo on the imports of Russian crude oil in a bid to cripple Kremlin's revenue and create a vacuum in its funding for the invasion of Ukraine.
The US Trade Representative noted that India's average applied tariff rate stood at 17% per cent, the highest of any major world economy.
Indian exporters shipping goods to Israel may face higher insurance premiums and shipping costs due to the Israel-Hamas conflict, according to experts. Israel witnessed a surprise and unprecedented multifront attack by air, land and sea by the Hamas militant group, which rules the Gaza Strip, in its southern parts on Saturday morning. The International trade experts said the conflict may reduce the profits of domestic exporters but will not impact trade volumes unless war escalates.
Top government officials in New Delhi have started discussions with stakeholders ranging from shipping and container companies to export promotion councils to understand the impact of the Iran-Israel tensions and plan ahead. Inter-ministerial talks are also being lined up amid the crisis situation in West Asia, sources confirmed. While the crude flows are not directly under any threat, elevated oil prices remain a concern, according to officials.
India, which appears to have been pushed back to being the world's sixth biggest economy in 2020, will again overtake the UK to become the fifth largest in 2025 and race to the third spot by 2030, a think tank said on Saturday. India had overtaken the UK in 2019 to become the fifth largest economy in the world but has been relegated to 6th spot in 2020. "India has been knocked off course somewhat through the impact of the pandemic. "As a result, after overtaking the UK in 2019, the UK overtakes India again in this year's forecasts and stays ahead till 2024 before India takes over again," the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) said in an annual report published on Saturday. The UK appears to have overtaken India again during 2020 as a result of the weakness of the rupee, it said.
India's unemployment rate witnessed a sharp decline to 6.57 per cent in January, the lowest since March 2021, as the country gradually recovers with easing of restrictions following a decline in Omicron cases, according to CMIE. While unemployment in urban India stood at 8.16 per cent in January, in rural areas it was the lowest at 5.84 per cent, as per data by independent think-tank Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE). In December, the unemployment rate stood at 7.91 per cent, with urban at 9.30 per cent and rural at 7.28 per cent, it added.
"We estimate that Pakistan now has a nuclear weapons stockpile of approximately 170 warheads. The US Defense Intelligence Agency projected in 1999 that Pakistan would have 60 to 80 warheads by 2020, but several new weapon systems have been fielded and developed since then, which leads us to a higher estimate," the Nuclear Notebook column published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on September 11 said.
The wholesale price index inflation is projected at 6.4 per cent for 2017-18.
A senior Afghan interim government official on Monday confirmed that strikes in the Afghanistan provinces of Paktika and Khost along the Pakistan border have taken place.
India's trade ties with Israel have only strengthened in the years after 2019. The total value of trade rose to $10.5 billion on a rolling four-quarter basis in June 2023 from $5.5 billion in the same month in 2019, shows a Business Standard analysis of data from the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE). A rolling four-quarter number provides a comparable figure across different time periods.
The growing economy has spun a wheel of fortune for Indians, with high income households outnumbering those in the low category for the first time at the end of 2009-10, according to estimates made by think-tank NCAER.
The National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) on Thursday lowered the GDP projection for the current fiscal to 4.7-4.9 per cent due to exchange rate depreciation.
India is Asia's fourth largest exporter of illicit capital with an estimated outflow of a whopping $104 billion between 2000 and 2008.
Three entities entrusted with job submit reports on black money estimation.
Government-estimated growth for 2008-09 is 7.1 per cent. However, as per RBI estimates, GDP growth would be around 6 per cent in 2009-10.
Besides India and China, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has projected weak growth for Brazil and Russia as well.
Driven by an estimated 8.4 per cent growth in the fourth quarter, the economy is expected to grow by 7.1 per cent in the just-concluded fiscal and by a robust 9.2 per cent in the current financial year, the leading economic think-tank CMIE has said.
Widening of the tax base, doing away with cess and surcharge, improvement in compliance and moderation in tax for emerging sectors are some of the suggestions submitted to the Finance Ministry ahead of the Budget by Think Change Forum (TCF). Experts are of the opinion that there is a need to grow tax revenues for the government to drive economic growth and make investments in developmental activities, TCF, the think tank said in a statement. Towards this end, poor compliance was identified as a weak link in achieving targeted collections leading to complex issues like overtaxing, complicated tax structures, rising litigation, among others.
