by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
By Anand Singh,
New Delhi : It was a challenging year for Indian Railways as it had to deal with a spate of accidents amid efforts to improve speed, revenue, safety and efficiency.
The year saw a change of guard at the ministry — the third of the Modi government and the 11th in the past eight years — with Piyush Goyal replacing Suresh Prabhu in September after 20 people died due to the derailment of Puri-Haridwar Utkal Express.
The new railway minister spelt out his priorities in terms of passenger safety, non-fare options to increase revenue, fast-tracking investments and electrification of routes.
There was also a change at the top in the Railway Board and Ashwani Lohani took over as its Chairman in August.
Days after taking over, Lohani wrote a letter to the employees urging them to pitch in wholeheartedly to set right the “image perception” of the national transporter that it was facing at a critical juncture.
Lohani said Railways had suffered a “serious dent” in the recent past due to unfortunate incidents and mentioned the need to bring down its operating ratio by steps such as reducing expenditure and increasing freight loading.
Railways is the largest rail network in Asia and the world’s second-largest under one management and carries 23 million passengers daily. It is also the world’s largest employer under single management and has an estimated 130,000 employees.
The year also saw the rail budget being merged with the general budget, breaking a tradition that had been continuing since 1924.
The foundation stone was laid for the country’s first bullet train network on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad route being built in collaboration with Japan that will cover the distance in just over two hours and is expected to have spin-offs, including new technology and skills.
The Railways have evolved a road map to increase speed of trains on some stipulated sectors that connect the metro cities as well as some state capitals.
It has also set a target to eliminate all unmanned level crossings by next year.
The challenges that Railways face include modernising the rolling stock such as locomotives and coaches, and reducing load of its sections running at above-line capacity (40 percent of Indian Railways’ 1,219 line sections are utilised beyond 100 percent).
Goyal has laid emphasis on mopping up internal resources and said that the national transporter was not looking at more funds in the 2018-19 budget as it is focused on monetising its own assets.
The Union Budget for 2017-18 pegged the Indian Railways’ capital expenditure at Rs 1.31 lakh crore, the highest ever in its history. Of this, gross budgetary support from the Finance Ministry was to the tune of Rs 55,000 crore.
According to an analysis done by IndiaSpend, a data journalism initiative, India’s death toll from train derailments in 2016-17 was the highest in a decade.
However, Railways’ own data says that “consequential train accidents” decreased from 107 to 104 in 2016-17 compared to the previous fiscal. It says that the number came down from 85 to 49 between April 1, 2017, and November 30, 2017, in comparison to the corresponding period last year.
The government had declared in 2015 that it will invest Rs 8.5 lakh crore in Indian railways to change the face of the sector. Goyal said earlier this year that railways is looking to invest about Rs 9.7 lakh crore in the next five years and this would help create 10 lakh job opportunities.
He also said that the ministry was reducing the time period for electrification of rail lines to save around Rs 10,000 crore per annum on fuel.
During the year, the railways introduced the country’s first semi-high speed fully AC train which has several modern facilities such as on-board LED TV, tea/coffee vending machine and bio-toilets.
The railways also started an SMS service about delayed trains with Rajdhani, Shatabdi, Tejas and Gatiman covered in the initial phase.
It also launced a new catering policy and initiated steps for 100 percent LED lighting at stations.
Under Project Swarn, 14 Rajdhani and 15 Shatabadi trains have been identified to significantly improve passenger experience.
If the efforts for a turnaround in the Railways yield results in the short term and there is boost to employment, it is likely to bring electoral dividends for the Narendra Modi government.
(Anand Singh can be contacted at anand.s@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Commodities, Commodities News, Corporate, Corporate Governance, Economy, Markets, News, Politics
By Biswajit Choudhury,
New Delhi : While the strategic petroleum sector, including oil and gas, continues to remain outside the new GST indirect tax regime that replaced a 70-year-old system, the industry did manage in 2017 to switch over to a new exploration regime that gives producers marketing and pricing freedom.
The petroleum industry has been pushing for its inclusion in the Goods and Services Tax (GST) structure so as not to be deprived of the benefits of input credit — a novel feature whereby goods and service providers get the benefit of input tax credit for the goods used, effectively making the real incidence of taxation lower than the headline rate.
The Centre is keen to bring under GST products like petrol and diesel that generate considerable reveue for the states, which they are loathe to surrender. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley provided this remarkable insight about the functioning of the Council that he heads.
“Everything has been achieved by consensus in the best spirit of cooperative federalism. There has been no politics, even from states which are controlled by opposition parties,” he told a gathering of industry leaders here.
During the course of the year on the other hand, India conducted its first auctions and, consequently, awarded the first licences for hydrocarbons exploration under a new revenue-sharing model, as opposed to the previous profit-sharing one, and the successful bidders had complete marketing and pricing freedom.
In the early part of the year, the government approved 31 contracts for exploration of small oil and gas contract areas under the Discovered Small Fields (DSF) Bid Round. As many as 46 contract areas designated for 67 discovered small fields across nine sedimentary basins were on offer, bids for which came in from majors like Cairn India and Hindustan Oil Exploration Co, along with from five smaller foreign firms.
The auction was held under the new Hydrocarbon Exploration and Licensing Policy (HELP) approved last year to replace the controversial production-sharing contracts (PSC) that had governed the bidding in nine earlier New Exploration Licensing Policy (NELP) rounds.
The PSC regime, which allows operators to recover all investments made from sale of oil and gas before profits are shared with the government, was criticised by India’s official auditor, who said it encouraged companies to keep inflating costs to postpone the sharing of profits.
The Open Acreage Licensing Policy (OALP) launched by the government in July allowed oil and gas companies to select exploration blocks on their own, without waiting for a formal bid round from the government. It replaced the old system of the government carving out areas for bidding them out.
As a necessary complement to the OALP, the country’s first national data repository (NDR) was also launched which allows explorers to access seismic data on the sedimentary basin before making their bids.
As many as 51 proposals seeking around 60,000 sq km of area for oil and gas exploration have been bid for in the maiden auction under the OALP, bidding for which is slated to be held twice a year.
“In the new model, the government will not micromanage, micro monitor with producers. Government will only share revenue,” Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said while announcing the OALP. The bidder offering the maximum share of oil or gas produced from the selected area would be awarded the block.
India’s domestic crude oil production of 36.95 million tonnes in 2015-16 barely met 20 per cent of its oil needs. Natural gas output at 32.249 billion cubic metres meets less than half of its needs.
The reforms in the sector in a bid to raise output comes in the current difficult context for the global oil industry caused by crude prices falling sharply from the highs of over $120 a barrel that prevailed two years ago.
Which leads to the other story of the year, whereby oil regained the $60 a barrel level, from lows of around $25, after the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), along with non-OPEC producers, put in place output cuts from January 1 to counter the fall in prices caused by a supply glut.
With prices hardening, India’s oil imports during October shot up by 27.89 per cent to $9.29 billion, from $7.26 billion in the same month last year. It forced the government to cut excise duty on transport fuels by Rs 2 a litre after the petrol price had progressively risen to over Rs 79 per litre in Mumbai, recording the highest since the coming of the Modi government.
In the major corporate move of the year in the sector in June, Reliance Industries and British energy major BP annnouced the creation of a joint venture energy vertical to work across the entire value chain, involving investment of $6 billion, or Rs 40,000 crore. This would also develop their existing deep-water gas fields in India’s eastern offshore to bring to fresh production of one billion cubic feet per day by 2022.
(Biswajit Choudhury can be reached at biswajit.c@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
By Mohit Dubey,
Lucknow : Uttar Pradesh was a parched land for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for 14 long years. Ever since the then Chief Minister Rajnath Singh lost the plot in the 2003 state assembly elections, the saffron party found itself on the sidelines of the country’s politically most crucial state.
In election after election, the BJP was battered by regional satraps like Samajwadi party (SP) chief Mulayam Singh Yadav and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo Mayawati. In 2017, its political “vanvaas” (exile) ended and the party romped home with its highest seat tally ever — 312 in a house of 403.
Building on the stunning victory of the 2014 Lok Sabha election, where the party won 73 of the 80 seats on offer, the BJP’s well-oiled organisation and a frenzied campaign by Prime Minister Narenda Modi, party President Amit Shah and many regional leaders ensured the end of the exile and a return home in style.
The party promised a dejected population the moon and swayed them in its favour. People, fed up with the BSP and the SP misrule, had little option. The development Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav’s brought was for all to see but apparently the electorate was miffed with the SP’s internal feud and the decision to join hands with Rahul Gandhi’s Congress.
The results were catastrophic for the SP and the Congress, the former slipping to its lowest-ever tally of 47 and the latter doing no better than its last showing.
The BJP’s “Dalit nahin Daulat ki beti” (Not a Dalit but the daughter of wealth) credo gained currency during the campaign and the BSP, which was largely being viewed by the media and political observers as a serious contender for the throne, was reduced to an abysmal 19 seats. The corruption charges stuck to Mayawati, already rattled by many desertions in the party.
Uttar Pradesh has always been the pivot of all politics that the saffron fold ever practised or preached. From a party of two members in the Lok Sabha to a centerstage challenger to the grand old Congress, the state has played an important role. It was here where the BJP’s biggest political asset and electoral ace — Ram Janmabhoomi — existed. But after reaping the harvest of the “Jai Shri Ram” wave in the late 1990, the BJP found itself mired in inner-party bickering in the early 2000s.
Its tallest leader in the state, a backward Lodh, Kalyan Singh, had rebelled against the party high command, then comprising Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani, and had to be ultimately thrown out. His replacement, Ram Prakash Gupta, could neither hold the party together nor the government. His forgetfulness became the butt of many jokes in political and bureaucratic circles. Kalyan Singh would often ridicule him on how the “beginning of BJP’s end” was for all to see.
And, as Kalyan Singh plotted his next moves — not to win seats but to dent the BJP — from his Mall Avenue bungalow, which also housed his close associate Kusum Rai, who was a cause of consternation when he was the Chief Minister, the BJP high command saw the damage that the tall backward leader was causing to its foundations in the Hindi heartland. Gupta was soon replaced by Rajnath Singh, the shrewd Thakur leader from eastern Uttar Pradesh — but apparently that was too little too late.
Under Rajnath Singh, who was often accused by colleagues and opponents of promoting only Thakurs, the BJP’s citadel cracked and the party lost power, coming down to two digits in the state assembly. Mandarins in the party stitched up an alliance with the mercurial Mayawati despite stiff opposition from the Brahmins and the Thakur lobby, who were still smarting under her past slogans like “Tilak Tarazoo aur Talwaar, inko maro joote chaar”.
After a brief, 56-day spell of President’s rule, BJP-BSP thrashed out differences and Mayawati became the Chief Minister for the third time round. But the problems kept mounting and Mayawati resigned in August 2003, parting ways amid acrimony, to end one of the strangest alliances in Indian politics.
In August the same year, Mulayam Singh Yadav was sworn in as the Chief Minister with the support of BSP dissidents and ran the government until 2007. It is widely speculated that a group of BJP leaders convinced Vajpayee that Mulayam would help in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections. This never happened but the SP made it to the Lok Sabha with its strongest contingent ever of 39.
Lawlessness and mis-governance led to Mulayam Singh’s loss at the hustings in 2007 and Mayawati returned with an absolute majority — and the BJP still remained on the fringes. In 2012, Mulayam Singh’s son Akhilesh Yadav led an impressive campaign and got a majority (for the first time) for his party.
The BJP, though looking upbeat yet again, did not move up in the electoral stocks. Its golden run started in 2014 when it peaked with 73 seats in the general election and, to its credit, it managed not only to maintain the lead in 2017 but also bettered it.
In March, however, when it picked firebrand monk-turned-politician Yogi Adityanath for the Chief Minister’s post, it left many amused — and many alarmed. Nine months down the line, though there have been no communal conflicts, Adityanath continues with his Hindutva agenda and the BJP continues to win elections — something most guess were things mandated from the head of the Gorakshnath Mutt.
(Mohit Dubey can be contacted at mohit.d@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
By Prashant Sood and Sidhartha Dutta,
New Delhi : Opposition parties face a daunting task to check the BJP’s rise and expansion under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the coming year presents them opportunities to do so in eight states that go to the polls. It will also test them for their ability to build up the momentum against the BJP in the run-up to the 2019 Lok Sabha poll.
Much will depend on the Congress Party’s performance in these state polls, as also the initiatives that its new President, Rahul Gandhi, takes in reaching out to other opposition parties.
Elections will be held in Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Tripura and Mizoram in 2018 — and in the four big states it is almost a direct contest between the BJP and the Congress, while in Tripura the battle will be between the CPI-M and the BJP.
With the Congress losing several elections over the past over three years, there is already talk of “collective leadership” in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections and suggestions against making it a presidential-style electoral contest against Modi.
The year saw 18 opposition parties coming together to put up common candidates for the presidential and vice presidential elections. But these parties, which included the Congress, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) did not come together for the Gujarat assembly polls which the Congress narrowly lost.
The 18 parties came together after the Uttar Pradesh elections that the BSP and the Samajwadi Party-Congress alliance fought separately and lost badly to the BJP.
NCP leader Tariq Anwar said the Congress lost about 12 seats in Gujarat because it did not ally with his party and the BSP. “They should not repeat the same mistake in the states going to the polls next year. If the Congress does well in these states, it will be a big boost ahead of the 2019 elections,” he said.
Anwar said next year’s state elections will give a clear picture about what will happen in 2019. “The elections will be a big challenge for the Congress and the opposition parties,” he told IANS.
Opposition parties, specially in states with multi-polar contests, have competing interests and any proposal to put up common candidates against the BJP in 2019 elections will need a lot of accommodation and hard work.
The Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party are seen as adversaries in Uttar Pradesh and the Left, the Congress and the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal. The Congress is an adversary of the Indian National Lok Dal in Haryana, of the Telanaga Rashtra Samiti in Telangana and of the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) in Odisha.
It is apparently in view of these contradictions and the lacklustre performance of the Congress since its debacle in 2014 that Trinamool Congress leader Derek O’Brien called for a “collective leadership” to bring all opposition parties together against the BJP in each state.
He has said that that the opposition should play to its strengths and make the Lok Sabha elections a sum of state elections.
Samajwadi Party leader Naresh Agrawal, MP, said “it was compulsion for the opposition parties to come together before the Lok Sabha elections” and parties such as BJD and Aam Aadmi Party should be part of the larger grouping.
“We will try that all opposition parties come together before the Lok Sabha elections. When Indira Gandhi was the Prime Minister, a similar situation was before the country. All parties came together and she lost the election. History has to repeat itself,” Agrawal told IANS.
T.K.S. Elangovan, a leader of Tamil Nadu’s DMK, said Rahul Gandhi’s campaign during the Gujarat polls had boosted Congress morale and stressed that in the upcoming elections, preparations should start much earlier.
“All secular parties should come together to fight the communal forces. They are trying to force Hindutva upon us. They are also spreading hatred,” he said.
Elangovan also said that the Modi government has not delivered on its promises such as employment and improving the lives of the people. “We need to expose their propaganda,” he said.
The CPI-M’s Mohammed Salim said the secular parties “should discover an alternative narrative and strategy against the communal forces and they should be defeated”.
CPI leader D. Raja said social forces have also to be mobilised, besides political parties, in the fight against the BJP and the Sangh Parivar, the umbrella organisation of the BJP and its right wing affiliates.
“A new economic and social narrative has to be devised to counter these forces,” he said.
On the flip side, Janata Dal-United leader and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s return to the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance earlier this year came as a blow to the opposition parties as he was seen as a leader who could emerge as a challenger to Modi.
RJD supremo Lalu Prasad’s conviction in a case relating to the multi-crore rupee fodder scam has also come as a blow to the efforts towards opposition unity.
But a comforting factor for the Congress and some other opposition parties has been the acquittal of all the accused in the 2G spectrum case, on which the BJP had launched a sustained campaign against Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government.
There would be many more chapters to this tale and it would be interesting to see the outcome towards the end of 2018.
(Prashant Sood can be contacted at prashant.s@ians.in and Sidhartha Dutta at sidthartha.d@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Corporate, Corporate Governance, Emerging Businesses, Large Enterprise, Markets, SMEs, Technology
By Sourabh Kulesh,
New Delhi : Mega cyber attacks such as “WannaCrypt” and “Petya” this year forced governments and enterprises globally, including in India, to focus and invest more on bolstering their security networks.
In the first major attack of the year, the world reeled under “WannaCrypt” that locked files on computers. Hundreds of thousands of computers were infected with the malware in May.
The primary reason for this attack being successful was not the software but human error. On March 14 this year, Microsoft released a security update which addressed the vulnerability in the 16-year-old Windows XP operating system.
Once the patch for the vulnerability was released, hacker group “Shadow Brokers” exploited this loophole and wreaked havoc in 150 countries. Those who installed the update were saved, while several who did not, fell prey to the attack.
Soon after the “WanaCrypt” attack, tens of thousands of computers globally were affected by the “Adylkuzz attack” that shut down SMB networking to prevent further infections with other malware (including the WannaCrypt worm).
While Europe and major parts of the world struggled with another big ransomware attack called “Petya”, India also bore the brunt. Some Indian servers were down owing to the Petya attack.
The Shipping Ministry said operations at one of the container terminals at Mumbai’s Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust (JNPT) was affected by Petya.
Companies like Genesis BM, a public relations firm, had to shut down systems in India after their international servers were attacked.
The month of May saw another cyber attack when a malware called “Judy” hit over 36.5 million Android-based phones, making its way through Google Play Store.
In August, the “Locky” ransomware, once considered almost defunct, sent over 23 million emails with the malware to the US workforce in just 24 hours. It scrambled the contents of millions of computers and demanded payment to unlock it.
A group of hackers leaked the “Game of Thrones” script, along with 1.5TB of HBO data that included other popular TV shows. The hacking group demanded approximately $6.5 million worth of Bitcoins from HBO.
A group of hackers also penetrated Equifax — one of the largest credit bureaus in the world — and stole personal data of 145 million people. Accountancy firm Deloitte was also targeted by a sophisticated hack that compromised the confidential emails and plans of some of its blue-chip clients and the attack went unnoticed for months.
In November, Yahoo agreed that it was attacked in 2013 wherein criminals had information about all three billion accounts. In another massive attack, hackers stole the personal data of 57 million customers and drivers from Uber Technologies. The breach was concealed for more than a year.
Most companies fall victim to cyber attackers either because of unpatched software with known vulnerabilities or because of the human factor like people falling victim to phishing emails, Finland-based cyber security firm F-Secure said.
Later in the year, the enterprise cyber security company FireEye said Chinese advanced persistent threat (APT) groups that have allegedly been creating cyber havoc internationally will shift their focus in 2018 to countries like India and Hong Kong and groups seen as a threat to Beijing’s influence over global markets.
Slowly becoming aware of emerging cyber threats, organisations worldwide will spend $96.3 billion on security in 2018 — an increase of eight per cent from 2017, according to a Gartner forecast.
More than 60 per cent of organisations globally will invest in multiple data security tools by 2020 — up from 35 per cent today, it added.
“Cyber attacks such as WannaCry and NotPetya, and most recently the Equifax breach, have a direct effect on security spend, because these types of attacks last up to three years,” the market research firm said.
To ward off future attacks, the Indian government set up NIC-CERT centre to monitor, detect and prevent cyber attacks on government networks. NIC-CERT will work in close coordination and collaboration with sectoral CERTs and CERT-In.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the fifth edition of the Global Conference on Cyber Space (GCCS) in New Delhi in November that witnessed top global security experts deliberating on ways to fight cybersecurity.
2017: Highlights
* “WannaCrypt” attack infected more than 230,000 computers in over 150 countries in a single day
* “Petya” ransomware attack hit India as some servers in the country became victim to the attack
* “Judy” malware hit over 36.5 million Android-based phones
* “Locky” ransomware sent over 23 million emails with the malware to the US workforce in just 24 hours
* The Indian government set up NIC-CERT centre to monitor, detect and prevent cyber attacks on government networks
* Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the fifth edition of the Global Conference on Cyber Space (GCCS) in New Delhi in November.
(Sourabh Kulesh can be contacted at sourabh.k@ians.in )
—IANS
