by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Media, News, Social Media
By Maeeshat Correspondent,
New Delhi, Sep 22: NDTV, considered to be only or one of very few TV channels which boldly raise public issues and strongly criticize whoever comes in the way while doing so – government or Opposition – is reportedly being sold to a businessman who is very close to BJP.
Strongest critic of the Narendra Modi government for its various decisions, NDTV will sell its 40 per cent share to Ajay Singh, co-founder and owner of SpiceJet who was part of the BJP’s 2014 poll campaign, says The Indian Express. Promoters of the channel senior journalist Prannoy Roy and his wife Radhika Roy will have 20 per cent share. Public shareholding in the company stands at around 40 per cent.’
According to The Indian Express which has quoted an unknown source in the channel, Singh, who was OSD of former BJP leader and Cabinet minister Pramod Mahajan, will take control of NDTV along with editorial rights. The total deal is valued at around Rs 600 crore.
However, while SpiceJet has rubbished the report when contacted by the daily, NDTV did not respond to its query.
Recently, CBI had conducted raids at the NDTV promoters for alleged tax evasion. However, the channel had termed the raid as attack on free press.
In various programs, especially its Prime Time hosted by famous journalist Ravish Kumar, the channel would boldly raise public-interest issues when most of other channels were busy in government propaganda or shallow, diversionary issues.
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
Mumbai : Maharashtra’s ruling ally Shiv Sena on Monday launched a sharp attack on the BJP for the runaway inflation and zooming fuel prices and said “Achhe Din” were being “murdered” daily by the government.
The party also took to task new union minister K.J. Alphons — who said recently that “those who can afford high prices of petrol and diesel are not starving” — for making “such highly irresponsible utterances.”
“This Navratna (Jewel) in the cabinet is justifying the steep high prices of fuel because he has never paid for it from his pocket. This is like spitting on the face of the poor who were not humiliated to such an extent even during the Congress rule,” the Sena said.
In strong editorials in the party mouthpieces ‘Saamana’ and ‘Dopahar Ka Saamana’, the Shiv Sena said it was shocking that Alphons even justified how nobody was dying because of the spiralling fuel prices.
“Listen to him! This bureaucrat-turned-minister with no political experience is probably full of the ‘merit’ that the BJP President Amit Shah said the Congress is lacking,” the Sena said.
“Have they forgotten, how – when there was a fuel hike during UPA, all top BJP leaders like Rajnath Singh, Sushma Swaraj, Smiri Irani and Dharmendra Pradhan – jammed the streets protesting with empty gas cylinders?” the Sena asked.
However, now when they have come to power, the poor were being mocked and ridiculed by persons like Alphons who were advocating inflation – and “all this is truly distressing”, the edit said.
“A major reason behind the thousands of farmers’ deaths in Maharashtra and elsewhere in the country is due to steep hike in fuel prices. There is the regular ‘shock of load-shedding’, so they have to depend on diesel-run generators for agriculture. Then, they are required to shell out higher prices for transportation of their farm produce to the distant markets.
“Many farmers simply can’t afford to pay all these high costs and hence resort to committing suicide,” the edit said.
The Sena pointed out that the masses were suffering because of the hike in petrol, diesel and gas prices. “‘Achhe Din’ are being killed daily,” it said.
“People have no food to eat, farmers continue to be in crises, inflation and unemployment are adding to peoples’ woes. When questioned about all these, a livid Maharashtra BJP legislator Pasha Patel abused and threatened a journalist last week and said he (the journalist) requires mental treatment,” the Sena said.
It said that from the billions of rupees to be spent on the Bullet Train project, if Rs 30,000-40,000 crore was diverted to tackle inflation, it would be serve everyone better.
“Patel called the journalist ‘mad and needing mental treatment’. Actually, it is those people who are praising the Bullet Train who are lunatics and deserve to be packed off to mental hospitals,” the Sena said.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Finance, News, Politics
Amit Shah
Ranchi : Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) President Amit Shah said on Saturday central funding to Jharkhand has increased under Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government.
“The central government under leadership of Modi is supporting the Jharkhand government. Jharkhand’s share in the central taxes which was Rs 39,938 crore during the 13th finance commission has increased to Rs 1,24,408 crore under the 14th finance commission while central grants have gone up from Rs 6,087 crore to Rs 9,469 crore,” Shah said in a press conference.
The BJP President said under Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana, 1.07 crore bank accounts have been opened in Jharkahnd in which Rs 1,992 crore have been deposited.
Shah lauded the work done by the Chief Minister Raghubar Das in the state.
“Jharkhand is gaining momentum of development in the leadership of Raghubar Das. Jharkhand has been stable and it is moving in right direction,” he said.
Asked about the party’s views on Rohingya Muslims staying in India, he said: “We have clarified our stand through affidavit that we are ready to extend all forms of support to Rohingya Muslims living in Myanmar.”
Asked about rising prices of petrol after new system (dynamic pricing) was introduced he said: “This is a new system. The government will take feedback from people.”
Shah also enumerated the work done under leadership of Modi in last three years.
“India is moving in right direction and the health of the economy is good. The inflation has decreased from 9 per cent to 3 per cent.
“BJP has ended the dynasty, caste and appeasement politics in the country,” he said.
Asked about Jharkhand Governor Draupdi Murmu returning the amendment in two land acts, he said: “It was not setback. The government has to take decision considering the sentiment of the people.”
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
New Delhi : Four Ministers of State — Dharmendra Pradhan, Piyush Goyal, Nirmala Sithraman and Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi — were on Sunday promoted to the Cabinet and nine new faces including four former bureaucrats became Ministers of States as Prime Minister Narendra Modi expanded the union council of ministers.
The promoted ministers and the new faces were administered the oath of office and secrecy by President Ram Nath Kovind at a 35-minute ceremony at the Rashtrapati Bhavan, attended among others by Vice President M. Venkaiah Naidu, Modi, BJP President Amit Shah, Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad and family members of the some new ministers.
The new Ministers of State are former diplomat Hardeep Puri, Gajendra Singh Shekhawat (MP), former Mumbai Police Commissioner Satya Pal Singh (MP), former bureaucrat K.J. Alphons as well as Ashwini Choubey, Shiv Pratap Shukla, Virendra Kumar, Anant Kumar Hegde and former union Home Secretary R.K. Singh (all MPs).
Sunday’s exercise did not involve BJP allies including the Janata Dal-United.
The portfolios of the new and existing ministers — if any of them gets a new ministry — will be known after Rashtrapati Bhavan issues a press communique on recommendations of the Prime Minister, who left for China after the swearing-in ceromony.
Pradhan (Petroleum), Goyal (Power), Sitharaman (Commerce and Industry) and Naqvi (Minority Affairs) were Ministers of State with independent charge.
Suresh Prabhu appeared to indicate that he will no longer be the Railway Minister.
“Thanks to all 13 Lacs plus rail family for their support, love, goodwill. I will always cherish these memories with me. Wishing you all a great life,” he tweeted. Prabhu had offered to quit after last months’s rail accident in Uttar Pradesh claimed 23 lives.
Among the new entrants, four are former bureaucrats. While Puri and Alphons are not members of Parliament, R.K. Singh and Satyapal Singh are members of Lok Sabha. Four others are from the Lok Sabha and one is from Rajya Sabha.
Puri, who was India’s Permanent Representative at the UN, joined the BJP ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha election. An officer of the 1974 IFS batch, he is known for his experience and expertise in foreign policy and national security.
Alphons, who earned the sobriquet “Demolition Man” when as DDA Commissioner he undertook a campaign against unauthorized constructions in Delhi scrapping 15,000 buildings, is a former IAS officer who joined the BJP in Kerala.
As a Collector, Alphons played a leading role in making Kottayam the first literate town in the whole country in 1989. He is the first BJP person from Kerala in the central government after the veteran O. Rajagopal.
R.K. Singh, a Lok Sabha member from Ara in Bihar, was union Home Secretary during the UPA rule and served in various capacities.
Satyapal Singh, an MP from Baghpat in Uttar Pradesh, was Mumbai Police Commissioner and is also known for his work in Maoist-affected areas of Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. He was credited with breaking the backbone of organised crime syndicates in the 1990s.
In the political category, Shiv Pratap Shukla, the Rajya Sabha MP from Uttar Pradesh, is a member of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Rural Development and a four-time member MLA in Uttar Pradesh. He has served as cabinet minister in the state for eight years and is known for his work in rural development, education and prison reforms.
The other nominee from Bihar, Ashwini Choubey, is a Lok Sabha member from Buxar. He was elected MLA from Bhagalpur five consecutive times and has held the portfolios of Health, Urban Development and Public Health Engineering.
Virendra Kumar is a six-time Lok Sabha member from Tikamgarh in Madhya Pradesh and is the chairman of Parliamentary Standing Committee on Labour. Choubey and Kumar have participated in the JP movement in 1970s and were imprisoned during the Emergency.
Hegde, a Lok Sabha MP from Uttara Kannada in Karnataka, is a seasoned parliamentarian having won five elections. He is a member of the parliamentary committee on External Affairs and Human Resource Development and has keen interest in rural development. Assembly elections are due in Karnatka early next year and in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan in the later part.
Shekhawat, a first time MP from Jodhpur in Rajasthan, is a techno savvy progressive farmer and is seen as a role model for the rural community. Known for his simple lifestyle, he is one of the most followed political leaders on Quora globally.
With Sunday’s exercise, the strength of the Modi ministry goes up to 76 including the Prime Minister. Twenty-eight are in the Cabinet.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions
By Amulya Ganguli,
It will take time for the economists to figure out whether the fall in the growth rate to 5.7 per cent is the result of the disruption caused by demonetisation and the Goods and Services Tax (GST), but most of the common people will see a connection between the two steps and a slowing down of the economy.
For most of them, the GST seems right — like the uniform civil code in another field of national life notwithstanding the teething troubles — but the jury is out on whether demonetisation was necessary if only because 99 per cent of the banned currency has been returned to the government.
Even if this means that those with unearned incomes have chosen to deposit their money in the bank, the question will remain whether the huge disruption caused by demonetisation was required to ferret out these holders of black money, especially when their numbers cannot be too large since most of the dubious earnings is not kept in cash but invested in gold, jewellery and real estate.
The claim that counterfeit currency will be detected by demonetisation has also been disproved by the fact that the amount of such notes that has been turned in is a mere 0.0007 per cent of the total.
If the government’s intention in wiping out 86 per cent of the currency in circulation in one fell swoop was the result of the failure to keep Narendra Modi’s election-eve promise of depositing Rs 15 lakh in each bank account by unearthing black money, it can only be described as a “monumental misjudgement”, as Manmohan Singh called demonetisation.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the government has changed its line from the initial justification of demonetisation as a means of breaking the back of the so-called parallel economy to that of converting the country into a cashless, digital economy.
However, even if this second objective is laudable, the unanswered question remains whether the shock and awe of demonetisation were necessary considering that more than 100 people died while standing in queues before banks and how an unknown number of small businesses suffered. According to one estimate, five million jobs were lost.
The fact that the people in general and the banking system have got back to their feet is a tribute more to their resilience than to the government’s wisdom. But what is undeniable is that they have been put through a wringer, as it were, when the ultimate gain in terms of cleansing the system has been negligible.
It is obvious that the same ends of trapping the hoarders of black money and nudging the country towards the greater use of plastic cards could have been achieved by far more carefully devised ways by experts which would not have caused the kind of turmoil set off by the sudden sweeping of the economy by the broom of demonetisation.
The utility of this reckless intervention is all the more doubtful since the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) claim that demonetisation paid it political dividends is not foolproof.
For instance, the party’s record in winning elections in 2017 is 3-2 considering that it lost in Punjab and came second in Goa and Manipur while winning in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand.
It is another matter that the BJP negated the outcomes in Goa and Manipur by some adroit manoeuvres in horse-trading in order to secure the allegiance of MLAs susceptible to enticements. But the original score line showed that demonetisation was not a booster for the BJP.
It is also unclear to what extent the dramatic step of November 8 last year has been a damper for terrorism and Maoism since Kashmir remains on the boil while the decline in the incidents of Maoist outrages from 155 in 2014 to 118 in 2015 to 69 in 2016 can be ascribed to a natural process caused by the gearing up of the official machinery and the realisation among the insurgents about the futility of their cause. Demonetisation, therefore, can hardly be advanced as a reason.
The worry for the government at present will be about the fall in the growth rate as it will rob the country of its claim of being the fastest-growing economy and accentuate the phenomenon of jobless growth.
It is the failure to rev up the employment scene which is making the government turn to the customary measures of wooing vote banks by expanding the ambit of the creamy layer for the backward castes and firming up the BJP’s electoral tactic of enticing the non-Yadav backward castes to its side through a sub-categorization of these groups. But in the ultimate analysis, only a buoyant economy can help the ruling party’s political fortunes.
If demonetisation has put paid to such hopes in the near future — although the new Niti Aayog vice-chairman, Rajiv Kumar, has called a link between the falling growth rate and demonetisation “spurious” — the government will have only itself to blame.
(Amulya Ganguli is a political analyst. The views expressed are personal. He can be reached at amulyaganguli@gmail.com)
—IANS
