Editorial — ✅ خرید وی پی ان ❇ ip ثایت vPn آی پی اختصاصی ◐

ژوئن 22, 2022

India exported 1.5 LMT wheat to Bangladesh since ban

INDIA HAS exported 1.5 lakh metric tonnes (LMT) of wheat to Bangladesh since the country banned export of the grain on May 13, Food Secretary Sudhanshu Pandey said on Wednesday.
Addressing a press conference, Pandey said, “There are many countries [which have requested import of wheat from India]. We would not like to discuss… This is a matter of foreign policy.”
However, he refused to divulge details of the requests received from other countries for wheat import from India.
When asked about the trend in atta (flour) exports, the Food Secretary said, “The trend is on the high side.”
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Partha S Das, Joint Secretary, Department of Food and Public Distribution said India exported 29.70 LMT of wheat and 2.59 LMT of atta between April 1 and June 22 this financial year.
Responding to questions, Das, who heads the committee that considers other countries’ requests for wheat import from India, said requests have been received from quite a few countries and those are “under consideration”.
On May 13, the government had banned all shipments of wheat with immediate effect. It moved the export of all wheat, including high-protein durum and normal soft bread varieties, from “free” to the “prohibited” category. The decision was aimed at controlling rising prices of wheat in the domestic market.

In wake of the Russia-Ukraine war, the demand for Indian wheat has increased overseas. In the current financial year, the government estimates about 45 LMT of wheat to have been contracted for exports.
In response to a query, S Jagannathan, Joint Secretary, Food Department said about 4.74 crore ration cards have been deleted in the past eight years. It has prevented diversion of food subsidies of around Rs 33,600 crore annually, he said.
Discussing the edible oil prices, the Food Secretary said major edible oil brands have cut prices by Rs 10-15. He said the timely interventions on multiple fronts by the government have led to a falling trend in edible oil prices.

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ژوئن 13, 2022

Home truths | The Indian Express

India’s industrial output rose 7.1 per cent year-on-year in April. Coming after a 11.4 per cent increase for the whole of 2021-22, it points to a recovery, albeit from the negative growth of the preceding lockdown-impacted fiscal. What’s worrying, however, is consumer non-durables production growing by just 0.3 per cent in April, on top of 3.3 per cent for 2021-22. The National Statistical Office’s data tallies with what private consumer research firms have also been putting out. NielsenIQ has estimated India’s fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector to have registered minus 4.1 per cent year-on-year volume growth in January-March, minus 2.6 per cent in October-December, and 1.4 per cent in July-September. Kantar Worldpanel has reported volume contraction in the country’s FMCG market for the last three consecutive quarters. Even the market leader Hindustan Unilever posted a 10.4 per cent sales turnover jump for the January-March quarter, but “with flat underlying volume growth”.
The simple takeaway is that the Indian consumer is buying less, although paying more for the same, if not less, volume of groceries and essentials. One reason is inflation. Most market surveys suggest high price increases to have impacted discretionary as well as staple consumption. While consumers are either cutting down on purchases or opting for lower-priced/ non-premium/unbranded products, FMCG firms have sought to push sales of smaller packs and even undertake “grammage reductions”. In other words, passing on soaring costs — whether of palm oil, wheat or packaging material — not through explicit price hikes, but by decreasing product weight/size for the same price points. There are limitations to such stratagems. Individual companies may grow significantly ahead of the market, gaining both value and volume shares. But even they would want the market itself to expand, rather than resorting to “shrinkflation” or consumers “downtrading” and “titrating” volumes.
Inflation should come under control, hopefully sooner than later. Of greater concern is the stress on incomes. Most households in India received little, apart from free grain, as stimulus during the last two years of job and income losses. As a result, they emerged from the pandemic with battered balance sheets. This is in contrast to the previous decade, where household consumption held up even as overall economic growth was dragged down by an over-leveraged corporate sector and bad loans-laden banks. That “twin-balance sheet” problem looks less of a threat. Profit margins of listed companies in 2021-22 were the highest for over a decade, with the non-performing assets ratio of banks moderating to their lowest in six years. Today, corporates and banks are better-positioned to invest and lend, respectively. But the weak balance sheets of households and government constrains their ability to spend — and that’s a real problem.
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ژوئن 6, 2022

Hate and Apology | The Indian Express

One lesson from Sunday is that an electoral majority does not entitle a political party to believe there are no red lines to its conduct, that it can dismiss every criticism as petty pandering to a “vote bank”. The hate speech against Islam that two spokespersons of the BJP peddled so glibly, on a national television channel and on social media, is reprehensible but the truth is that it was no sudden eruption of bigotry. The BJP’s electoral victories since 2014, and especially after 2019, have emboldened party activists and others of the saffron brigade to an extent that they indulge in casual everyday anti-minority actions with the confidence that they have a free hand to do this. The government, from Prime Minister Narendra Modi down, and the party, from J P Nadda down, prefer silence as the baying gets more loud and shrill, as so-called dharam sansads advocate no less than mass murder and men, in saffron, claiming to redeem Hinduism, peddle hate and misogyny. Result: Every such act that is allowed to go unpunished and uncensured emboldens the next.
If the party acted to suspend spokespersons Nupur Sharma and Naveen Jindal on Sunday, it was because the anger against their remarks was not something that could be dismissed as expressions of “sickularism” but is resonating throughout the Islamic world threatening to upend India’s most important relationships, alliances key to its strategic imperatives that Prime Minister Modi himself has nurtured. But the condemnation of hate speech for the sake of international optics is like sticking a band-aid on a festering wound. In the diplomatic embarrassment that Vice-President M Venkaiah Naidu had to suffer while on an official visit to Qatar — the Indian envoy was summoned and lectured to — is the second lesson. Such conduct is no longer protected by silos, and has wider repercussions. Prime Minister Modi once claimed that the Congress was upset that he had good relations with the Islamic world. All it took was 30 seconds of unadulterated hate spewed by the party’s face on television to send that goodwill evaporating. External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, whose erudition in Bratislava is being hailed as India’s coming-of-age speech, will have to provide a better explanation for the conduct of his colleagues than reasoning that they mark the rise of the “non-elites” and “India’s way” of “correcting historical wrongs”.
India has the second largest Muslim population in the world, and irrespective of the fact that the BJP does not need their votes, as a party in office, it needs to show by word and deed that it is a government of all communities. On social media, the “trads” — hardline Hindutva trolls — are tearing up the BJP for caving in to international pressure. They are invoking the liberal posters of Salman Rushdie and Charlie Hebdo and the principles of free speech. The Government will be mistaken if it thinks two sound-bites are the problem and two suspensions the solution. Hate speech is unacceptable in itself, from the mouths of ruling party members targeting a minority it mainstreams bigotry, causes dangerous divisions, and is against the national interest. It is time this message went out from the very top. This doesn’t — and shouldn’t — need a prod from an ally in the Gulf.
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می 31, 2022

Sharif’s gamble | The Indian Express

Forget, for a moment, the many problems between India and Pakistan that have persisted into the 75th year of Partition and Independence. For anyone in South Asia and beyond interested in Pakistan as a major state — it has the world’s fifth largest population, a valued geopolitical location, a leading role in the Islamic world, and a powerful army equipped with nuclear weapons — the real question is whether Pakistan can redeem itself. As the seven-week-old Shehbaz Sharif government turns to the International Monetary Fund to arrest the macroeconomic crisis, seeks uninterrupted support from the armed forces until the next elections in the summer of 2023, and tries to reboot its regional and global policies, few can bet on Pakistan’s prospects.
Admittedly, Pakistan has muddled through many crises in its history. But can it manage those that confront it today? Consider, for example, PM Sharif’s bet that by turning to the IMF, he can stabilise the economy that many are convinced is headed Sri Lanka’s way. Pakistan has been to the IMF before, 22 times to be precise. But none of the attempts to stabilise the economy with the IMF’s help have been accompanied by a serious effort to reform and remove the deeper constraints on it. The story this time is unlikely to be any different. Sharif’s decision to raise fuel prices and risk popular anger has been viewed as a “bold” move. His predecessor Imran Khan had walked out of the agreement with the IMF a few months ago to prevent a political backlash at home. Sharif’s calculus appears to be based less on a credible strategy to revitalise the economy than a bid to appease the army leadership and win its support for staying on in power. But the army is not known to be kind to civilian leaders. There is speculation that it will pull the plug on the Sharif government once it implements the hard and unpopular IMF demands.
On the face of it, Sharif leads a broad-based coalition that has brought together both the Pakistan Peoples Party and the Pakistan Muslim League alongwith a host of other parties. But the army, which has never let a civilian government function effectively, is unlikely to give a free hand to Sharif. It has just dumped Imran Khan after installing him in power in 2018. What is new, though, are the divisions within the army on a range of issues — on managing the domestic political order, rebooting the economy, and rearranging regional and international relations. Imran Khan, who had defied the GHQ on all three fronts, appears to enjoy considerable support among the middle classes as well as within the ranks of the army. To make matters worse, Pakistan’s regional and international standing has been in steady decline. This does not augur well for either Pakistan or its neighbours. But Delhi must persist with the engagement of all key formations in the Pakistan polity to prevent bilateral relations from turning worse in the coming days and to forestall unwanted crises.
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می 30, 2022

Eight years on | The Indian Express

THE Narendra Modi government completing eight years is a moment to pause and look back — and ahead. When it came to power in 2014, a large swathe of Indian voters saw in the slogan of “achche din”, and in the BJP’s energetic bid to wrest power at the Centre under the leadership of a man who had made himself a name, and controversy, as chief minister, a promise for a break from the status quo. In the first five years, from rethinking the language of welfare to recasting nationalism and reworking foreign policy, the Modi government made an impact that led to its re-election in 2019 with a decisive majority. Looking back, the eight years of Modi’s rule so far have been dominated by the last three. And in these, the government’s record has been two-toned — it has shown resolve, boldness, and a capacity for navigating complexity in some areas but it has been stiff and unmoving in others.
The signal that the second term would be more change-making than the first was sent by the abrogation of Article 370 in Kashmir in August 2019. Only months after that, came the enactment of a law that made religion a criterion for citizenship for those in the neighbourhood seeking refuge. The next year, the government inaugurated the construction of the Ram temple at Ayodhya. But if the Modi government took these large, contentious steps, it also faced steep challenges. While the over a year-long farmers’ agitation on Delhi’s doorstep could be traced back to the farm laws it enacted in September 2020, the public health emergency that began with the Covid outbreak earlier that year, and this year’s Ukraine war, are problems it has been forced to step up to. On balance, the Modi government has shown a mature head in crisis, coming back after a period of paralysis during Covid’s second devastating wave, to set in motion a strikingly successful vaccination programme. It resisted pressures to provide more direct support to a people lacking in safety nets, but ran a comprehensive free rations programme, ensuring efficient and mostly corruption-free delivery. Amid the continuing economic slump and joblessness, it has signalled a recommitment to its privatisation programme, with the sale of Air India and the LIC IPO. With China, after the face-off in Galwan, and 15 rounds of talks later, it shows firmness and resolve. With the US, it is strategically — and boldly — strengthening areas of convergence in the Indo-Pacific, even as, on Ukraine, it has negotiated a position keenly conscious of competing priorities. All this, under the leadership of a prime minister whose popularity is burnished more strongly than before.
And yet, the maturity and nuance that the Modi government shows in the areas outlined above seem to elude it when it comes to others — be it its heavy-footed handling of the agitation against the CAA-NRC, its attempt to forcibly join the dots between those protests and the communal violence later in northeast Delhi, its use of the IPC to tar dissent, its weaponisation of Central agencies to target political opponents. Its ringing silence amid the bid to reopen the faultline that now stretches from Ayodhya to Gyanvapi and its failures to restore the political process in Kashmir are part of the same problem. A government capable of thinking afresh seems trapped in stale resentments when it comes to the imperative that lies at the heart of democracy: Trust between communities and a respectful place for minorities. With the Opposition weaker than it was, and not many countervailing institutions, the Modi government will need to find it in itself to course correct. For, the challenges of inflation and recession, Ukraine war, China’s sabre-rattling, expectations of the young — these call for a governance that includes all, that does not let ghosts of history hijack spirits of the future, that heals old wounds without rubbing them in. Eight years on, that’s the hope.
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