SC refuses to relax ban on crackers in NCR, rejects traders' plea

India will suspend all domestic flights from midnight Tuesday, the final piece of a nationwide lockdown that threatens Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attempts to revive an economy already expanding at the slowest pace in more than a decade.

The flight ban compliments a cancellation of all passenger trains through March 31, as authorities try to halt the spread of the coronavirus in the world’s second-most populous country, which has poorly equipped hospitals and inadequate social security. Modi on Monday held a conference call with some of India’s top entrepreneurs and bankers, who urged policymakers to immediately slash interest rates by as much as a full percentage point, transfer cash to the poorest citizens, and suspend loan-repayments.

Over the past three days, state after state has declared curfews and India’s international borders have been shut for most visitors since March 11. India so far has 492 virus cases, including nine deaths. But experts say the country could be on the same trajectory as Italy, where the outbreak quickly escalated, causing hospitals to overflow.
A traveller stands outside a near-empty Delhi Junction Railway Station in Delhi, March 22.

"This is the biggest lockdown in world history,” said Raghu Raman, a former soldier with the Indian Army and founder of the National Intelligence Grid, an umbrella database aimed at countering terrorism. “This strategic pause gives decision-makers more time to arrest the exponential spread of the virus and evaluate trade-offs.”

Controlling the outbreak is crucial for Modi, who remains India’s most popular political leader currently though his economic management has faced criticism. Foreign investors are selling Indian assets at an unprecedented pace and failure to contain deaths and infections could erode some of the prime minister’s personal appeal at home.

Oxford Economics slashed India’s January-March growth forecast to 3%, a number not seen even during the worst of the global financial crisis. The main equity gauge rose about 3% on Tuesday after a record 13.2% plunge Monday, and the rupee stayed near its all-time low.

“A part of the cerebral cortex that senses fear and survival seems to have activated in the minds of investors,” said Umesh Mehta, Mumbai-based head of research at Samco Securities Ltd. “The only relief in this market can come from either policy makers and regulators, or from some positive news that a cure for the pandemic is near.”

Bloomberg Economics estimates Modi’s administration needs at least 1% of gross domestic product -- $30 billion -- to meaningfully respond to the virus outbreak. Meanwhile, the nation’s billionaires are diverting their factories to manufacture medical equipment and pledging to keep paying their staff even as production grinds to a halt. India allowed companies to use their philanthropy funds to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

Reliance Industries Ltd., controlled by India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani, has helped equip a hospital in Mumbai dedicated to patients of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. It will also build quarantine centers and produce 100,000 facemasks a day and other personal protective equipment for health workers. The group’s telecom unit will offer free broadband to enable work-from-home during the lockdown and will pay its lowest paid workers twice a month to protect household incomes.

Ambani joins Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd. Chairman Anand Mahindra and Vedanta Resources Ltd. Chairman Anil Agarwal -- a combined worth of more than $40 billion between the trio -- who have so far made pledges.

Indian companies are responding to Modi’s shutdown call. Maruti Suzuki India Ltd., Tata Motors Ltd., Toyota Kirloskar Motor, Hero MotoCorp., Samsung Electronics Co. and LG Electronics Inc., Mahindra Group, TVS Motor Co., Kia Motors Corp., Renault Nissan Automotive India Private Ltd., and Yamaha Motor India are among companies that have announced factory suspensions.

Policymakers are aware of the risks of such a move. India -- with a record 5.9 trillion rupees of local corporate debt maturing this year -- faces “waves of default” if cash flows aren’t maintained, the government’s principal economic adviser Sanjeev Sanyal said an interview.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman last week said the government will announce a relief package for coronavirus-affected sectors as soon as possible. The Reserve Bank of India, which is due to review interest rates April 3, announced a 1 trillion rupee cash injection on Monday.

“Let me assure, whatever it takes to keep the cash flow going in the economy will be done,” Sanyal said. “We need to make sure that when we are past the health storm, we still have an economy that has not gotten gridlocked. Because unwinding that would be more difficult.”

New Delhi, Jul 21: Air India trade unions have complained to Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Puri that the government has now turned a blind eye to the management's ethnic cleansing at lower levels through compulsory leave without pay (LWP), redundancies and wage cuts.

In a letter to Puri, the Joint Action Forum of Air India unions said, "We are deeply ashamed to say that it seems that after praising our Air Indian Corona Warriors at grand functions, respectfully, the government has now turned a blind eye to this management's ethnic cleansing of Air Indians at the lower levels, through compulsory LWP, redundancies and wage cuts."

The Joint Action Forum of Air India unions strongly opposes this Compulsory Leave without pay scheme as it is an illegal practice and is not a voluntary scheme.

"In fact the Board resolution itself empowers the Chairman and Managing Director with extraordinary powers, which seem akin to a High Court, to pack off employees on 2 years leave (extended to 5 years) at CMD's discretion or at the arbitrary whim of the Regional heads," the trade unions said.

"This said Compulsory LWP scheme violates every labour law put in place by Parliament and orders of the Supreme Court and various other courts and seeks to dispossess the lower categories workers of their legally guaranteed rights," it added.

The trade unions have pointed out that the redundancies are at the elite management cadre level and not the workers.

"We are indeed shocked that the management of Air India could prepare and formulate a scheme for compulsorily sending workers on leave without pay, which is akin to an illegal lay-off, under the garb of a Leave Without Pay, when ironically the redundancy actually lies in the upper echelons of management and not with the humble workers of Air India, who have slogged to make our Airline the treasure it is," they complained to Puri.

"It must be noted that out of 11,000 permanent employees, our management occupies almost 25% as Executive Cadre, with little or no accountability. Solely amongst the Elite Management Cadre, we have 121 top officers ranking from DGMS, GMs, EDs to Functional Directors, most of whom are either performing duplicate job functions or are indeed redundant and not to mention the retired relics serving as consultants and also the CEOs of various subsidiary companies," they added.

Trade unions said the redundancy or compulsory leave without pay scheme if any at all, has to apply only to these Executives, more so, when they do not even have protection of labour laws or Supreme Court orders.

Strangely, the topmost corporate executive cadre and the backroom Generals, have saved themselves from the axe of wage cuts, by sacrificing a piffling of a few grand, whilst the frontline warriors of flying cabin crew, engineers, ground staff have borne the biggest brunt head on, the unions said.

New Delhi, Fevb 10: Of the countries most at risk of importing coronavirus cases, India ranks 17th, researchers have found on the basis of a mathematical model for the expected global spread of the virus that originated in China's Wuhan area in December 2019.

So far, India has reported three coronavirus positive cases -- all from Kerala.

Among the airports in India, the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi is most at risk, followed by airports in Mumbai, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad and Kochi, according to the model.

The new model for predicting global novel coronavirus cases has been developed by researchers from Humboldt University and Robert Koch Institute in Germany.

"The spread of the virus on an international scale is dominated by air travel," said the study.

"Wuhan, the seventh largest city in China with 11 million residents, was the relevant major domestic air transportation hub with many connecting international flights before the city was effectively quarantined on January 23, 2020, and the Wuhan airport was closed. By then the virus had already spread to other Chinese provinces as well as other countries," it added.

The researchers said that it is possible to estimate how likely it is that the virus spreads to other areas by looking at air travel passenger numbers.

"The busier a flight route, the more probable it is that an infected passenger travels this route. Using these probabilistic concepts, we calculate the relative import risk to other airports. When calculating the import risk, we also take into account connecting flights and travel routes that involve multiple destinations," said the study.

The top 10 countries and regions at risk of importing coronavirus cases are: Thailand, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, USA, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore and Cambodia, according to the model.

While Thailand's national import risk is 2.1%, it is 0.2% for India, found the research.

The foundation of the model is the worldwide air transportation network (WAN) that connects approximately 4,000 airports with more than 25,000 direct connections.

The model accounts for both, the current distribution of confirmed cases in mainland China as well as airport closures that were implemented as a mitigation strategy.

This network theoretic model is based on the concept of effective distance and is an extension of a model introduced in the 2013 paper "The Hidden Geometry of Complex, Network-Driven Contagion Phenomena" published in the journal Science.

The current outbreak of the 2019-nCoV virus started in Wuhan city, Hubei province, China. While the first cases were reported as early as December 8, 2019, the outbreak gained global attention on December 31, 2019, when the World Health Organization was alerted to "several cases of pneumonia" by an unknown virus.

The new virus was soon identified as a novel coronavirus and named 2019-nCOV. It belongs to the family of viruses that include the common cold and viruses such as SARS and MERS. On January 20, 2020, it was confirmed that the coronavirus can be transmitted between humans, greatly increasing the risk of a global spread.

The death toll due to the novel coronavirus outbreak in China has increased to 811 on Sunday, surpassing that of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic in 2003.

Although about 20 countries have confirmed cases, China has accounted for about 99 per cent of those infected. The first foreign victims of the virus both died on Saturday in Wuhan.