Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Monday presented the Budget for 2021-22 in the Lok Sabha that is expected to provide relief to the pandemic-hit common man as well as focus more on driving economic recovery through higher spending on healthcare, infrastructure and defence amid rising tensions with neighbours, As India emerges from the COVID-19 crisis, the ninth Budget under the Modi government, including an interim one, is widely expected to focus on boosting spending on job creation and rural development, generous allocations for development schemes, putting more money in the hands of the average taxpayer and easing rules to attract foreign investments.
On June 23, in a huge blow to Indian IT professionals eyeing the US job market, the Trump administration suspended the H-1B visas along with other types of foreign work visas until the end of 2020 to protect American workers in a crucial election year.
You have to make yourself visible and create opportunities for yourself, advises Gaurav Goyal, co-founder, Scalenut.
Two of the three youths killed in an encounter with security forces in the Parimpora area of Srinagar were 'radically inclined' and working as overground workers of the Lashkar-e-Tayiba (LeT) terror outfit, police said on Friday and added that the case was being investigated.
Twitter's India-born CEO Parag Agrawal has told worried employees that he doesn't know "what direction this company will go in" once the whopping $44 billion deal, which will take the social media giant private, closes with new owner billionaire Elon Musk.
Buoyed by an increase in public investment and incentives to boost manufacturing, India's economy is expected to grow by 8.3 per cent in the fiscal year 2021-22, less than the previous projection early this year before the country was hit by the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Bank has said in its latest report. World Bank chief economist for the South Asia Region Hans Timmer told PTI here that when one looks at the high frequency data, they see that as a result of the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, the recovery paused, and some indicate that the recovery actually declined briefly. "We project for this fiscal year 8.3 per cent (growth rate for Indian economy) that is less than we projected early in the year before the health crisis caused by the second wave. "Given the sharp contraction of the economy last year, it might not look like a lot, but in my view, that is actually very positive news, given the violent second wave and the severity of the health crisis," he said on Thursday.
Hemant Shivsaran lists the number of projects the Modi government has announced since August to woo Gujarat voters.
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has weathered the pandemic very well, and has earned tremendous goodwill from customers, which enhanced the firm's standing in the market, N Chandrasekaran, chairman, said in his virtual address of the 26th Annual General Meeting on Thursday. He said TCS shareholders received over 3,000 per cent return on their investments since the company was listed in 2004.
The McKinsey report said faster employment growth at 12 million non-farm jobs annually is needed in the post-Covid period till 2029-30, up from just four million created each year between 2012 and 2018.
Adapting to the new hybrid normal of remote and office work, cautiously optimistic corporate are looking to hire more people and provide better appraisals in the new year as they step out of the pandemic-ravaged 2020. The coronavirus pandemic emerged as the biggest inflection point for the Indian job landscape. For the corporates, work-from-home and remote workers became the new normal and for the professionals, online learning and digital skills took centrestage.
35 districts have been reporting high active COVID-19 caseload and fatality rate. These 35 districts comprise all 11 districts in Delhi, Kolkata, Howrah, North 24 Parganas and 24 South Parganas in West Bengal; Pune, Nagpur, Thane, Mumbai, Mumbai Suburban, Kolhapur, Sangli, Nashik, Ahmednagar, Raigad, Jalgaon, Solapur, Satara, Palghar, Aurangabad, Dhule and Nanded in Maharashtra; Surat in Gujarat; Pondicherry in Puducherry and East Singhbhum in Jharkhand.
The department had launched searches against the 48-year-old actor and the Lucknow-based group of industries involved in infrastructure on September 15 and the CBDT said the action was continuing.
The key demand drivers -- such as low home loan rates and income tax sops, particularly for affordable housing -- that supported the recovery in H2 FY2021, remain in place and will spur recovery again, feel experts.
On-site registration and appointment has now been enabled for the 18-44 years age group on the CoWin platform for COVID-19 vaccination, the Union health ministry said.
According to several industry sources in the know, expenses towards deploying contractual staffer, which used to account 10 per cent of the overall billable employee cost at IT firms, has fallen to around 3 per cent. IT firms typically use the contractual workers from staffing solutions providers or subcontractors.
Addressing an online question and answer session, WHO's chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan said there would be at least one effective vaccine by 2021 but it would be available 'only in limited quantities'. "Most people agree, it's starting with healthcare workers, and frontline workers, but even there, you need to define which of them are at highest risk, and then the elderly, and so on," Swaminathan said on prioritising who gets the vaccine first.
Bayannur, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, announced a level III warning of plague prevention and control, state-run People's Daily Online reported. The suspected bubonic plague case was reported on Saturday by a hospital in Bayannur.
The P-8I, which is widely acknowledged to be the world's most deadly LRMR-ASW aircraft, is a derivative of the Boeing 737-800 airliner, onto which a plethora of sensors and weaponry has been fitted.
Deepak G C, 49, an electrical engineer, shares his fascinating story.
We are adapting to the situation by innovating new delivery modelss, launching brand campaigns that are impactful in the current context and closely monitoring changes in consumer buying behaviour, he said.
As a politician, Yadav is amiable and a consensus-maker, not hamstrung by dogma.
The measures include maintaining social distancing, wearing of masks, proper sanitisation, avoiding large congregations, protecting vulnerable persons and follow all COVID-19 guidelines issued by the ministries of health and home, it said.
To keep up with the COVID guidelines, the site has imprinted norms saying not more than 5,000 visitors are allowed in a day. Also, group photographs are not at all encouraged. Guards are keeping strict vigil so that tourists do not touch the railing and walls of the monument and used tissue paper, mask, gloves shoe covers are dumped in the dustbin.
The country must adopt Singapore's three-pronged strategy of creating new jobs, redeploying displaced workers and constantly upskilling workers.
The BJP calling the Congress a "torn old party" moving towards a stage where its relevance and necessity will be completely lost.
It said while Indian IT services companies were the "disruptors" and had created the modern offshoring industry, they are now incumbents, challenged by a host of specialised and niche start-ups that have emerged in the new digital environment.
We have our own problems for sure and they are not trivial, but for now, our economy is in not too bad a shape, our politics is as personality-driven and authoritarian as that of most countries in the world. We must make the best of what we have and not be excessively unhappy looking at the grass on the other side of the septic tank which may not be greener after all!, observes Shreekant Sambrani.
The active cases have surpassed the 12-lakh mark, while the death toll increased to 1,70,179 with 904 daily new fatalities, the highest since October 18, the data updated at 8 am showed.
It was a quiet reopening with few people venturing warily to watch a mix of regional, English and Hindi reruns such as "Chhichhore", "Thappad", "Tanhaji" and "The Spy".
'...if elections were to be held today.' 'The problem is Akhilesh is not very aggressive.' 'Had he started his campaign aggressively six months ago, the picture in UP would have been very different.'
The procurement and distribution will be centralised though the government is yet to take a call on the initial number of doses that will be procured.
The Election Commission has done its homework pretty well on political hashtags, observes ad guru Sandeep Goyal.
With the hybrid model in place, employees can take advantage of the working from office to build better working relationships, trust, and comradeship.
Last year, it was not just the economy that slowed hiring. Employers were also unable to complete the verification process because of the lockdowns, resulting in delays in hiring and an increase in discrepancies between an employee's professed abilities and the reality. The experience is driving many companies to automation. In a recent EY survey, 56 per cent of the companies said they'd automated their processes, while 72 per cent felt technology could be leveraged to digitise employee records.
He made a reference to the clash between Indian and Chinese troops in Ladakh's Galwan Valley in June this year. "What our jawans can do, what the country can do, the world has seen in Ladakh," he said.
'Business will be 20% of what it was before the lockdown.'
The Supreme Court has asked the Centre to place on record all relevant documents and file notings reflecting its thinking culminating in the COVID-19 vaccination policy, and the purchase history till date of all jabs including Covaxin, Covishield and Sputnik V.
The overall death toll stood at 4,633 and no new fatalities were reported on Sunday.
Candidates need to be agile to understand the situation, be receptive to unlearn and learn and adapt accordingly, advises Sanjeev Verma, vice president-HR, STT GDC India.
Here are 10 images that prove we live in a wonderfully weird world!
