Robert Vadra leaves ED office after five-and-a-half hours of questioning; grilling to continue on today

May 29: A total of 367 domestic flights, carrying 30,136 passengers, operated throughout the country till 5 pm on Thursday, Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri said.

Airports in West Bengal also started operations on Thursday, three days after domestic air travel resumed in India after a gap of two months.

All scheduled domestic passenger services were suspended in India from March 25 to May 24 due to restrictions in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

Earlier in the day, Puri had said that 460 domestic flights carrying 34,336 passengers were operated on Wednesday.

In the case of West Bengal, the minister on Sunday had said that the state will handle domestic flights from Thursday.

"Figures for domestic flights for 28th May 2020 are in. Departures 367, 30,136 passengers handled. Arrivals 310, 25,530 passengers handled. Total movements 677 with 55,666 passenger footfalls at airports.

 “Total number of flyers 30,136. These are numbers till 1700 hrs for Day 4," Puri said in a tweet.

A total of 428 domestic flights carrying 30,550 passengers and 445 domestic services carrying 62,641 flyers were operated in the country on Monday and Tuesday, respectively.

In February this year, when the lockdown was not imposed, around 4.12 lakh passengers travelled daily through domestic flights in India, according to Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) data.

During the pre-lockdown period, Indian airports handled around 3,000 daily domestic flights, aviation industry sources said. A total of 16 asymptomatic passengers on seven different flights including 13 of them who travelled by IndiGo have tested positive for COVID-19 since the resumption of domestic air services on Monday, according to airlines data.

Two of the three asymptomatic passengers who tested positive for the infection had travelled by Spicejet while one took a flight of Air India subsidiary Alliance Air.

The Karnataka government, meanwhile, said on Thursday it has requested the civil aviation ministry to reduce the number of flights originating from five states--Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan--in the light of the high number of COVID-19 cases there, hours after a minister said it has "suspended" air travel from these states.

Seeking to clarify his statement, Law and Parliamentary Affairs Minister J C Madhuswamy maintained that Karnataka has not sought imposing a ban on flights from the five states as reported in some sections of the media. "India is flying high. Domestic operation figures for May 27, 2020 (till 23.59 hrs): Departures 460 with 34,336 passengers handled. Arrivals 464 with 33,525 passengers handled," Puri had said earlier in the day on Twitter.

If a flight takes off before midnight and lands in another airport after midnight, its departure and arrival are counted on different days, leading to a seeming mismatch in the figures of a particular day.

The Delhi airport, India's busiest airport, is scheduled to handle 147 departures and 145 arrivals on Thursday, said senior government officials. The Mumbai airport's operator MIAL said it handled a total of 50 domestic flights on Thursday. International passenger flights continue to remain suspended in the country.

Airports in West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Telangana and Tamil Nadu have been allowed to handle a restricted number of daily flights as these states do not want a huge influx of flyers amid the rising number of COVID-19 cases.

While domestic services resumed in Andhra Pradesh on Tuesday, they restarted in West Bengal on Thursday.

Though domestic flight operations across the country began on May 25, they could not be restarted in Kolkata and Bagdogra as the state's machinery was involved in relief and restoration work after cyclone Amphan's devastation.

"Welcome Back, Passengers! Kolkata Airport saw the arrival of 122 passengers from @DelhiAirport after two long months and 40 passengers departed to Guwahati. Proper checks were followed, and regular sanitization was carried out in the terminal which was abuzz with passengers," the Kolkata airport tweeted.

On Thursday, eleven flights took off from Kolkata and an equal number arrived in the city, sources at the Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport said.

"A total of 1,745 passengers arrived and 1,214 passengers flew out of the city today (Thursday)," airport sources said.

The airports in Kolkata and Bagdogra are permitted to handle 20 daily flights each from Thursday onwards.

While it is not clear how many flights were handled by the Bagdogra airport on Thursday, the officials said 899 passengers arrived while 484 passengers departed from the airport during the day.

The West Bengal government recently came up with a set of guidelines for people arriving in the state on domestic flights.

According to it, those entering the state from Thursday must submit a self-declaration form, stating that they have not tested positive for COVID-19 in the past two months.

The passengers will also need to undergo health screening after they arrive at the airport, the state's guidelines said.

Feb 2: Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s second budget in seven months disappointed investors who were hoping for big-bang stimulus to revive growth in Asia’s third-largest economy.

The fiscal plan -- delivered by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Saturday -- proposed tax cuts for individuals and wider deficit targets but failed to provide specific steps to fix a struggling financial sector, improve infrastructure and create jobs. Stocks slumped as a proposal to scrap the dividend distribution tax for companies failed to impress investors.

"Far from being a game changer, the budget provides little in terms of short-term growth stimulus,” said Priyanka Kishore, head of India and South East Asia economics at Oxford Economics Ltd. in Singapore. “While income tax cuts will provide some relief on the consumption front, the multiplier effect is low and the overall stance of the budget is not expansionary."

India has gone from being the world’s fastest-growing major economy three years ago, expanding at 8%, to posting its weakest performance in more than a decade this fiscal year, estimated at 5%.

While the government has taken a number of steps in recent months to spur growth, they’ve fallen short of spurring demand in the consumption-driven economy. Saturday’s budget just added to the glum sentiment.

Okay Budget

“It’s an okay budget but not firing on all cylinders that the market was hoping for,” said Andrew Holland, chief executive officer at Avendus Capital Alternate Strategies in Mumbai.

The government had limited scope for a large stimulus given a huge shortfall in revenues in the current year. The slippage induced Sitharaman to invoke a never-used provision in fiscal laws, allowing the government to exceed the budget gap by 0.5 percentage points. The result: the deficit for the year ending March was widened to 3.8% of gross domestic product from a planned 3.3%.

On Friday, India’s chief economic adviser Krishnamurthy Subramanian said reviving economic growth was an “urgent priority” and deficit goals could be relaxed to achieve that. The adviser’s Economic Survey estimated growth will rebound to 6%-6.5% in the year starting April.

The fiscal gap will narrow to 3.5% next year, as the government budgeted for gross market borrowing to rise marginally to 7.8 trillion rupees from 7.1 trillion rupees in the current year. A plan to earn 2.1 trillion rupees by selling state-owned assets in the year starting April will also help plug the deficit.

Total spending in the coming fiscal year will increase to 30.4 trillion rupees, representing a 13% increase from the current year’s budget, according to latest data.

Key highlights from the budget:

* Tax on annual income up to 1.25 million rupees pared, with riders

* Dividend distribution tax to be levied on investors, instead of companies

* Farm sector budget raised 28%, transport infrastructure gets 7% more

* Spending on education raised 5%

* Fertilizer subsidy cut 10%

Analysts said the muted spending plan to keep the deficit in check will lead to more downside risks to growth in the coming months.

“It is very doubtful that the increase in expenditure will push demand much,” Chakravarthy Rangarajan, former governor at the Reserve Bank of India told BloombergQuint, adding that achieving next year’s budget deficit goal of 3.5% of GDP was doubtful.

With the government sticking to a conservative fiscal path, the focus will now turn to central bank, which is set to review monetary policy on Feb. 6. Given inflation has surged to a five-year high of 7.35%, the RBI is unlikely to lower interest rates.

What Bloomberg’s Economists Say:

The burden of recovery now falls solely on the Reserve Bank of India. With inflation breaching RBI’s target at present, any rate cuts by the central bank are likely to be delayed and contingent upon inflation falling below the upper end of its 2%-6% target range.

-- Abhishek Gupta, India economist

Governor Shaktikanta Das may instead focus on unconventional policy tools such as the Federal Reserve-style Operation Twist -- buying long-end debt while selling short-tenor bonds -- to keep borrowing costs down.

New Delhi, Jun 6: Military commanders of India and China are scheduled to meet today at Moldo on the Chinese side of the Line of Actual Control (LAC), to discuss the ongoing dispute along the LAC in Eastern Ladakh.

The Commander of the Leh-based 14 Corps of the Indian Army Commander Lieutenant Gen Harinder Singh will meet his Chinese equivalent Maj Gen Liu Lin, who is the commander of South Xinjiang Military Region of Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) to address the ongoing tussle in Eastern Ladakh between the two countries over the heavy military build-up by the People's Liberation Army along the LAC there.

The two sides have held close to a dozen rounds of talks since the first week of May when the Chinese sent over 5,000 troops to the LAC.

On Friday, officials of India and China interacted through video-conferencing with the two sides agreeing that they should handle "their differences through peaceful discussion" while respecting each other's sensitivities and concerns and not allowing them to become disputes in accordance with the guidance provided by the leadership.

In the last few days, there has not been any major movement of the People's Liberation Army troops at the multiple sites where it has stationed itself along the LAC opposite Indian forces.

India and China have been locked in a dispute over the heavy military build-up by the People's Liberation Army (PLA) where they have brought in more than 5,000 troops along with the Eastern Ladakh sector.

The Chinese Army's intent to carry out deeper incursions was checked by the Indian security forces by quick deployment. The Chinese have also brought in heavy vehicles with artillery guns and infantry combat vehicles in their rear positions close to the Indian territory.