India news — صفحه 5 از 8 — ✅ خرید وی پی ان ❇ ip ثایت vPn آی پی اختصاصی ◐

ژوئن 4, 2022

Eateries can hike rates, shouldn’t charge more through deceit: Goyal

A day after the Centre said that it will soon release a “robust framework” to ensure strict compliance of its 2017 guidelines, which bars charging for service by hotels and restaurants, Union Minister of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution Piyush Goyal said that restaurants can not ask customers to pay hidden charges.
Addressing a press conference, Goyal said, “You [restaurants] can raise wages of your workers by raising rates. There is no bar on that. We would welcome it if they raise their employees’ wages. They are free to increase the wages of their employees and they are free to charge any rate.”
“Par chhal se chhupa hua ek rate aur wo bhi kuch charge karte hain kuchh nahin karte hai…to logon ko kaise maloom padega ki kya real price hai. (But [they cannot charge] a hidden rate by deceit, that too, some of them charge and others don’t. In this situation, how will people know what the real price is?),” Goyal said, in response to a query.
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Goyal’s remarks came a day after the Department of Consumer Affairs held a meeting with restaurant associations, in which representatives of restaurant owners’ association stood their ground on the issue of service charge and said collecting service charge is neither illegal nor in violation of law. However, the Consumer Affairs Department said that it will soon release a “robust framework” to ensure strict compliance of its 2017 guidelines, which bars charging for service by hotels and restaurants.

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ژوئن 4, 2022

Explained: Engaging with the Taliban

When India sent an official delegation to Kabul earlier this week, it was the first time that New Delhi signalled that it wanted a formal engagement with the Taliban.
With this, it appears that the Indian foreign and security establishment is less divided about the need to engage formally with the Taliban and prevent getting marginalised in a country that New Delhi sees as vital to its strategic interests in the region, and where the people’s affection for India is legendary.
Although recognition of the Taliban government is not on the cards yet, Thursday’s visit may have paved the way for the reopening of the Indian embassy, albeit a downgraded one.
From 1996 to now, India’s journey from first opposition, then diffidence to engaging with the Taliban, to the resigned acceptance of its inevitability, is in no small measure a story of India’s problematic relationship with Pakistan.Best of Express PremiumPremiumPremiumPremiumPremium
In 1996, when the Taliban fought their way through warring mujahideen factions into Kabul for the first time, India, fearing a spillover on Kashmir insurgency (there was indeed some), backed the Northern Alliance with money and weapons. As the scholar Avinash Paliwal has pointed out (My Enemy’s Enemy: India in Afghanistan from the Soviet Union to the US Withdrawal), New Delhi did briefly contemplate opening contacts with the group but dropped the idea as the establishment was divided on reaching out to a group tied to Pakistan.
India bore the brunt of this nexus twice. During the 1999 hijacking of IC814, when the Pakistani hijackers took the plane to Kandahar, the then ruling Taliban acted as a support arm of the hijackers. Second, in 2008, the CIA traced the bombing of the Indian Embassy at Kabul to the Haqqani group, part of the Taliban and deeply embedded with the Pakistani security establishment. The bombing was reported to have been carried out at the orders of the ISI. Moreover, Lashkar -e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed were increasingly reported to be present in Afghanistan.
Reconsidering the Taliban
After 9/11, under the US umbrella, India invested money and energy into the rebuilding of Afghanistan. But by 2010, with increasing doubts about the US continuance, India was once again considering reaching out to the Taliban.
In the final months of UPA-2, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef , who was the Ambassador in Pakistan in the Taliban’s first regime, made a splash at a literary event in Goa. He had been invited as the author of the bestselling My Life with the Taliban. Then Home Minister P Chidambaram was in a photograph that also included him. Then in the opposition, the BJP trained its guns at the government for keeping company with an Islamist extremist.
Media reports then quoted government sources as saying it was not Zaeef’s first visit, and that keeping a door open to the Taliban was necessary. The reasons were the same as they are today: New Delhi did not want to be left out or marginalised in the Afghanistan of the future. After getting Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011, the Obama Administration was getting ready to declare an end to the war, and the US and the Taliban had already made tentative contact towards talks.
But with Pakistan continuing to loom large – the Pakistan security establishment, which had a huge role in the birth of the Taliban, had given Mullah Omar and other Taliban leaders sanctuary in Quetta after the 2001 US invasion, and sustained them with money and weapons — New Delhi did not have the will to pursue the plan seriously.
Pakistan shadow
As talks between the Taliban and the Trump Administration took off, the Indian establishment decided to put its weight behind President Ashraf Ghani and the government of Afghanistan, which had been left out of the talks. When it became increasingly clear that far from collapsing, the talks might actually lead to Taliban rule or at least a set-up in Kabul with a significant Taliban presence, India flagged “concerns” about terrorism, even as it looked for a seat at the table in any of the several regional groups, and also for openings to the Taliban.
One view was to build relations with factions in the Taliban that were opposed to Pakistan, but there was little clarity on how strong such factionalism was, and if such factions had any influence. An Indian diplomat who had been approached by a Taliban leader once in a foreign capital said talking to the Taliban was “the same as talking to the ISI”.
It was evident that India had missed the bus. Pakistan had delivered the Taliban to the Trump Administration for talks. Russia was backing the Taliban fully as the future ruler of Afghanistan, seeing in this sweet revenge for its own defeat in Afghanistan by US-financed, Pakistan-trained mujahideen; Iran, also glad at America’s defeat at the hands of the Taliban, hosted a delegation of the Shia-persecuting group in Tehran. China leveraged its relationship with Pakistan to get a foot into Kabul.
Nine months after the Taliban took over Kabul, 15 countries have a diplomatic presence in the country. Pakistan, China and Russia never shut down; others, including the EU, have re-opened to facilitate to humanitarian assistance. The Taliban regime is not recognised by any country yet. When members of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation’s anti-terror sub-group met in Delhi recently to discuss the situation in Afghanistan, host India was the only one without a diplomatic presence in Kabul.
Counter-intuitive timing
India’s cautious opening to the Taliban has come at a time when the group has made it clear it has not changed from its previous mediaevalism. Restrictions on women have increased, from not being allowed to attend school to curbs on free movement in public spaces and at work. A UN Taliban monitoring committee has reported that the Taliban continue to remain close to al-Qaeda, with a significant presence of its multinational fighting force in Afghanistan. The report has also flagged JeM and LeT training camps in Nangarhar and Kumar, close to the Pakistan border. India is the chair of the Taliban sanctions committee.
However, a view that has gained ground in the Indian establishment is that it is time to de-hyphenate Pakistan from the Taliban, especially as the Pakistan security establishment is finding the going tough with the Kabul regime.
The Pakistani Taliban (TTP), which has spread terror in Pakistan since it came into existence in 2007, has found sanctuary in Afghanistan, and it has taken several rounds of negotiations mediated by the Afghan Taliban for the Pakistan security establishment to arrive at a ceasefire with the TTP. There are other disagreements between the Kabul regime and Pakistan, including over Durand Line as the border between the two countries.
Another reason advanced for India’s change in policy is that the Taliban in power are more divided than they were as a fighting force, and that the situation may provide room for a layered political and diplomatic engagement with different actors. It has also helped that the Taliban have made no hostile statements on Kashmir since taking over in Kabul.

The ban on girls’ high-school education is reported to have brought out rifts in the open between hardliners led by supreme leader Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada and others seen as pro-West Taliban, such as Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanekzai. In all this, the Haqqani are projecting themselves as the true moderates.
Gautam Mukhopadhaya, a former Indian Ambassador to Kabul, said the hardening of the regime, widening internal rifts, and the resistance against the Taliban getting more organised made for a “far from stable Taliban rule”.
As long as the move helps the Afghan people, facilitating humanitarian assistance through international organisations, and paving the way for access to consular services, Mukhopadhaya said it was a step in the right direction.
“It is a good move towards Afghan people, provided the [Afghan] opposition is being taken into confidence and is kept in touch with on a parallel track, and basic principles are not sacrificed for formal relations,” Mukhopadhaya said.

ژوئن 4, 2022

Explained: A not-for-profit company with defined objectives

The Enforcement Directorate on Wednesday, summoned Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi following a trial court order that allowed the Income Tax Department to probe the affairs of the National Herald newspaper — owned by AJL— and conduct a tax assessment of Sonia and Rahul.
BJP MP Subramanian Swamy had in his complaint in 2013 alleged cheating and misappropriation of funds on part of the Gandhis in acquiring the newspaper. He had alleged that the Gandhis acquired properties owned by the National Herald by buying the newspaper’s erstwhile publishers, AJL, through an organisation called Young India — a Section 25 company — in which they have 86% stake. Sonia and Rahul had been granted bail in the case by the trial court on December 19, 2015.
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While the Congress has described the case as “weird” since “no money was involved”, it said that AJL became an indebted company and it converted its debt into equity by assigning its debt to a new company— Young India — and became debt-free.Best of Express PremiumPremiumPremiumPremiumPremium
The Congress has said that since Young India has been created under a special provision of the Companies Act — Section 25 — it has to be a not-for-profit company and no dividend can be given to its shareholders or directors.
So, what is a Section 25 company?
As per the Companies Act, 1956, a Section 25 company — similar to what is defined under Section 8 under Companies Act, 2013 — is a not-for-profit charitable company formed with the sole object of “promoting commerce, art, science, religion, charity, or any other useful object, and intends to apply its profits, if any, or other income in promoting its objects, and to prohibit the payment of any dividend to its members”.
Section 8 of the Companies Act, 2013 includes other objects such as sports, education, research, social welfare and protection of environment among others.

While it could be a public or a private company, a Section 25 company is prohibited from payment of any dividend to its members. Section 25 states that by its constitution the company is required/ intends to apply its profits, if any, or other income in promoting its objects and is prohibited from paying any dividend to its members.”
What are prominent examples of Section 25 or Section 8 companies?
According to details available with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, a large number of companies have been formed under the Section. Among these are Reliance Foundation, Reliance Research Institute, Azim Premji Foundation, Coca Cola India Foundation, and Amazon Academic Foundation.
Why are companies formed under Section 25 when there is a Trust structure in place?
Experts say that most people looking to form a charitable entity go for forming a company under Section 25, now Section 8, rather than a Trust structure because most foreign donors like to contribute to a company rather than Trust because they are more transparent and provide more disclosures.
Tax experts say that if a company has to be converted into a not for profit company, they can’t be converted into a Trust, however, they can be converted into a Section 25/ Section 8 company.

ژوئن 3, 2022

From coercion to swindle to China link: The menace of rising loan app scams

When a 22-year-old Zepto employee Sohail Shaikh recently needed some money, a “Magicloan” ad on YouTube for instant micro loans came to his mind. On April 24, he ended up taking a loan of Rs 6,000 from two apps, “Magicloan” and “cashmarket”.
“I was supposed to pay them back on April 30. I would get my salary on May 1, so I thought I would return it a day later. Their (loan apps) people however started calling me on April 29. I told them about the payment deadline but it didn’t matter — they were abusive,” Shaikh told The Indian Express.

His ordeal had just started, though. “A day later, some of my colleagues and relatives called me saying they received a photograph of my wife with obscene things scrawled on it. I was shocked as to how could they get her photo and their numbers. And then I realised they had access to all my phone data. I had to explain to everyone that I had taken a small loan and these people were loan agents. It was traumatic,” he said.
On April 14, a 24-year-old woman from Mumbai’s Charkop lodged an FIR in the Kandivali (West) police station, alleging that cyber fraudsters called her from 25 different mobile numbers and threatened to defame her if she did not repay a loan, which she had never taken, and forced her to pay Rs 4.50 lakh. They also sent obscene messages about her to many people in her contacts list including her family members and friends. Her cousin sister even received a WhatsApp message which tagged her number and photo as that of a sex worker.Best of Express PremiumPremiumPremiumPremiumPremium
“Those 15-20 days were most horrible days of my life. Police asked me to switch off my phone but fraudsters sent obscene messages to 150 people in my contacts list, mostly family members. They only made WhatsApp calls. When my uncle tried to make a normal call to them, an old woman in Karnataka took it. They were using her number for their WhatsApp,” she said.
Mumbai Police has lodged 47 loan app fraud cases during March-April, of which it could crack only 1 case. It had filed 42 such cases during the entire last year, cracking 5 of them.
While the loan app scam cases have been reported from across the country, there have been cases in Maharashtra and Telangana of their victims being driven to even suicide. At least 8 such victims killed themselves in Telangana over the last one-and-a-half years.
The modus operandi of these scamsters has been that they offer “hassle free” micro loans through online apps, which do not check a borrower’s credit worthiness or seek any documents while immediately transferring money to his account. It is this “no questions asked” method of these apps as against traditional lending institutions seeking rigorous verification and background checks that have made them popular among people.

Their popularity rose especially during the Covid pandemic, when many people lost their livelihood and were in desperate need of money to meet their day-to-day expenses. However, according to several police officers and cyber experts, those seeking loans through these apps now include corporate employees looking for additional money at the end of a month or youngsters needing money to buy virtual currency.
Cyber expert Ritesh Bhatia said that since the demand for micro credit has dipped now, there have been several cases where these operators have demanded money from people even if they have just downloaded their apps. “In some cases, if you have taken a loan once, they will push another loan from some other app. Also, on occasions, they demand money once you have downloaded the app, since they have access to your contacts now. The app is developed in such a way that once you download it, it gives the loan companies complete access to the phone data. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t availed of a loan from the app,” Bhatia said.
What many who are lured by the easy credit availability do not know or fail to check is the fudge relating to the interest rates charged and the recovery mechanism. In some cases, when people read the interest rate on their loans as 0.8%, they miss that it is a daily rate, Bhatia said. “There have been cases where people have ended up paying as much as 66% interest.”
A Mumbai cyber police officer said even the GST is deducted from the loan amount. “And within a week, you start getting calls seeking repayment of these loans,” he said. This is where the victims’ harassment begins as recovery agents enter the scene.
An officer said that when people install these apps on their phones, they generally do not realise that they are also giving access to their phone data to them. “So, when the person is not able to make the payment, the recovery agents have access to the numbers of their family members, relatives, colleagues and friends. They call them up claiming that they were appointed the loan guarantor. It is to pressure them to ensure the borrower makes the payment.”

However, Bhatia said some recovery agents have resorted to “dirty tricks” now. They use nude pictures or porn clips to morph the borrower’s image and then send it to the victim’s family members, relatives and friends.
It was such a murky operation that allegedly forced the Malad-based imitation jewellery businessman Sandeep Koregaonkar, 38, to die by suicide on May 4 after he found that his morphed photos were sent to his loved ones, the police said. His family said he had not taken any loans and just downloaded the apps.
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It was Koregaonkar’s suicide that forced Mumbai Police to wake up to severe harassment involved in these cases. Its preliminary investigations led them to some call centres, linked to such apps, operating primarily out of Delhi and Noida among other places across the country.
In another recent case of sexual harassment being probed by the Andheri railway police, there were 170 calls made to a Dombivli-based victim. After she could not make the loan payment, her morphed video was sent to her cousin sister on WhatsApp, who then approached the police. A 19-year-old man was picked up from Karnataka as his phone was used to send this obscene content. The police later learnt that the fraudsters had used his number to activate their WhatsApp and that the loan app, owned by two Kerala businessmen, had outsourced their database of borrowers to a Delhi-based call centre for recovering loans for a commission.
The police have also found that some of these micro loan apps are “Chinese loan apps developed by Chinese nationals”. In such cases busted across the country, it was found that the accused, after collecting money from victims, would convert it into cryptocurrency and send it to China, said a cyber police officer.
In several cases, the victims end up taking money from one loan app to save themselves from other app’s harassment. In a case being probed by Mumbai’s BKC cyber police station, a company’s senior executive took a total of Rs 1 lakh loan from 10 apps. Within days she received 80 calls from Delhi, Noida and other places in states like Meghalaya and Andhra Pradesh. In her case too, the fraudsters sent her obscene videos and threatened to defame her, forcing her to cough up Rs 12 lakh.

What has made the police investigations more challenging is that in most of these cases the scamsters have taken “precautions” to cover their tracks. In the senior company executive case, when the police tried to trace the account where she was asked to make a payment, they found it belonged to another borrower.
An independent director at the Fintech Association for Consumer Empowerment (FACE), Srinath Sridharan, said that for common people it is “very difficult” to distinguish between the genuine RBI-affiliated loan apps and fraudulent ones. “RBI has complicated the rules so much that it is confusing to differentiate between authorised and unauthorised apps,” he said.
Sridharan said in its 2021 report the RBI’s working group on digital lending had made several recommendations to curb this menace, which were however not implemented. “The only solution is that RBI conduct digital supervision of NBFCs to ensure that none of them are involved in lending through these unauthorised apps,” he added.
Recently, with such frauds on the rise, Google came out with more stringent guidelines (see Box) allowing only those loan apps on its Play Store that are registered with the RBI. Bhatia, however, said it would not make much of a difference as the accused would create apps and put up links on their websites and send them to their victims’ WhatsApp or Telegram accounts to be downloaded. The police as well as cyber experts stressed on the need for raising public awareness against such dubious loan apps.

ژوئن 1, 2022

India, Pakistan discuss river water issues at Permanent Indus Commission meeting

The 118th meeting of the Permanent Indus Commission (PIC) comprising Indus Commissioners of India and Pakistan concluded here on Tuesday. In a statement, the Ministry of External Affairs said that the two-day meeting was held in a “cordial manner”.
During the meeting, the annual report for the year ending on March 31, 2022, was finalised and signed, the statement said. The delegations were led by Indian Commissioner for Indus Waters AK Pal and his counterpart from Pakistan Syed Muhammad Mehar Ali Shah.
“The Commission appreciated the commitment of the two sides to interact frequently and resolve issues through bilateral discussions under the Indus Water Treaty-1960,” the MEA statement said. “It was agreed to hold the next meeting of the PIC in Pakistan on mutually convenient dates,” it said.
Meanwhile, in a statement, Pakistan’s Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesperson’s office said, “A wide range of water-related issues between Pakistan and India were discussed which included the advance sharing of flood information, the programme of tours/inspections and signing of the report of the Commission for the year ending March 31, 2022.”Best of Express PremiumPremiumPremiumPremiumPremium
“Pakistan also highlighted its objections on India’s hydroelectric projects on the Western rivers. Response to Pakistan’s objections on Indian projects, including Pakal Dul, was also sought. The Indian side was also urged to communicate advance flood-flow information as per the provisions of the treaty and the practice in vogue since 1989 until 2018,” the statement said.
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“Indian side assured to arrange tours/inspections after the coming flood season. The Indian side also assured that Pakistan’s outstanding objections will be discussed in the next meeting as the Indian side is still in the process of examining the details,” it said.
“Both sides reiterated their commitment to implement the Indus Waters Treaty in its true spirit and expressed the hope that the next meeting of the Commission will be held at an early date in Pakistan,” it said.
The last edition of talks was held in Islamabad on March 1-3, 2022, in which Pakistan had assured India of “all necessary actions” to ensure the free flow of Fazilka drain into the Sutlej river. The issue of hydropower projects was also discussed, where the Indian side conveyed that all its projects are “fully compliant” with the provisions of the Indus Water Treaty.
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According to the provisions of the Indus Waters Treaty, around 33-million-acre feet (MAF) water of the eastern rivers — Sutlej, Beas, and Ravi — is allocated to India for unrestricted use annually, and about 135 MAF of western rivers (Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab) largely to Pakistan.
Under the treaty, India has been given the right to generate hydroelectricity through a run of the river projects on the western rivers subject to specific criteria for design and operation. It also gives the right to Pakistan to raise concerns on the design of Indian hydroelectric projects on the western rivers.