New Delhi, Jul 16: Congress members on Tuesday walked out of the Lok Sabha after its leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury was not allowed to raise an issue in the House.
Chowdhury was urging Lok Sabha speaker Om Birla to allow him to raise an important issue, but Birla denied as Union Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari have started speaking on the demand for grants under his ministry.
Congress members then walked out of the House but later came back.
Washington, Jan 12: US president Donald Trump said Saturday the United States was monitoring Iranian demonstrations closely, warning against any new “massacre” as protests broke out after Tehran admitted to shooting down a passenger plane.
Iran said earlier it unintentionally downed a Ukrainian jetliner outside Tehran, killing all 176 people aboard, in an abrupt about-turn after initially saying that it had crashed due to mechanical failure. The firing came shortly after Iran launched missiles at bases in Iraq housing American forces.
President Hassan Rouhani said a military probe into the tragedy had found that “missiles fired due to human error” brought down the Boeing 737, calling it an “unforgivable mistake.”
Trump told Iranians -- in tweets in both English and Farsi -- that he stands by them and is monitoring the demonstrations.
“To the brave, long-suffering people of Iran: I've stood with you since the beginning of my Presidency, and my Administration will continue to stand with you,” he tweeted.
“There can not be another massacre of peaceful protesters, nor an internet shutdown. The world is watching,” he added, apparently referring to an Iranian crackdown on street protests that broke out in November.
“We are following your protests closely, and are inspired by your courage," he said.
The new demonstrations follow an Iranian crackdown on street protests that broke out in November. Amnesty International has said it left more than 300 people dead. Internet access was reportedly cut off in multiple Iranian provinces ahead of memorials planned a month after the protests.
On Saturday evening, police dispersed students who had converged on Amir Kabir University in Tehran to pay tribute to the victims, after some among the hundreds gathered shouted "destructive" slogans, Fars news agency said.
State television reported that students shouted "anti-regime" chants, while the news agency Fars reported that posters of Soleimani had been torn down.
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.
Dhaka, Jan 3: Bangladesh's paramilitary force chief said on Thursday that a total of 445 Bangladeshi nationals returned from India in last two months following the publication of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) by the Indian government.
Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) Director General Maj Gen Md Shafeenul Islam disclosed the figure during a press briefing here.
"About 1,000 people were arrested in 2019 for illegal border crossings from India to Bangladesh, with 445 of them returning home in November and December," he said.
After verifying their identities through local representatives, BGB came to know that all the intruders are Bangladeshis, Islam said, adding that 253 cases were lodged against them for illegal trespass, while initial investigations found that at least three of them were human traffickers.
The BGB Director said the trespassing did not create any tension between the border forces of Bangladesh and India.
Last week, Islam visited India where he said that the creation of the NRC is completely an "internal affair" of India and the cooperation between the border guarding forces of the two countries is very good.
He said the BGB will continue to do its work of preventing illegal border crossings as per its mandate.
A BGB delegation, led by Islam, was on a bilateral visit to India to hold DG-level border talks with its counterparts, the Border Security Force (BSF).
The talks took place from December 26-29, during which a host of issues related to cross-border smuggling and activities of criminals and others along the 4,096-km-long front were discussed.
Responding to a question, Islam said, "No discussion was held at the conference over the (NRC) issue".
He said during the five-day talks held in New Delhi, the BGB demanded that the BSF should take effective steps to prevent killings of Bangladeshis on frontiers as casualty figures sharply rose in 2019.
"The number of border killings in 2019 was highest in the last four years. As per our calculation, the number of such unexpected deaths was 35," the BGB chief said.
However, the BSF estimate of the casualty figure is much lower than our calculation, he said.
Islam said the BSF is following the policy of maintaining maximum restraint and minimal use of force even after being attacked by "armed border offenders".
A statement issued by the BSF last month in New Delhi after the conclusion of the DG-level talks said, "On the concern of the BGB regarding the death of Bangladeshi nationals on borders, it was informed to them that a non-lethal weapon policy is strictly followed by BSF personnel on borders.
"Firing is resorted to only in self-defence, when BSF patrols are gheraoed and attacked by ‘dah’ (a sharp-edged weapon) etc. It was specified that the BSF does not discriminate between criminals based on nationality," it said.
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