Archive for ‘Chindia Alert’

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13/02/2014

* India Approves Paying $54-a-Ton Subsidy for Raw Sugar Exports – Businessweek

India, the world’s biggest sugar producer after Brazil, will introduce a subsidy on raw sweetener exports to boost shipments amid a domestic glut, a government official said.

The cabinet approved a 3,333 rupees ($54) a metric ton subsidy for exports in February and March and will review the amount in April, the official, who asked not to be named because the person isn’t authorized to speak to the media, said in New Delhi yesterday after the cabinet meeting. That’s 67 percent more than the 2,000 rupees previously proposed by the Food Ministry. India will subsidize as much as 4 million tons in the next two years, the official said.

Bajaj Hindusthan Ltd., Balrampur Chini Mills Ltd. (BRCM) and other mills are counting on government support to increase shipments and trim record losses as cane costs climb and prices drop. The subsidy will help spur exports from India and help the country compete with supplies from Thailand, Michael McDougall, a senior vice president at Newedge Group in New York, said by phone yesterday. Refineries including Dubai-based Al Khaleej Sugar Co. will benefit from Indian supplies, he said.

via India Approves Paying $54-a-Ton Subsidy for Raw Sugar Exports – Businessweek.

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13/02/2014

* Rice Exports From India Climbing to Record on Mideast Demand – Businessweek

Rice shipments from India, the world’s largest producer after China, will probably expand to a record as buyers from Iran to Saudi Arabia boost purchases of aromatic basmati grain used in biryani and pilaf dishes.

Exports are set to increase 7.8 percent to 11 million metric tons in the 12 months through March from a year earlier, said M.P. Jindal, president of the All India Rice Exporters Association. Sales of basmati may jump 14 percent to 4 million tons as cargoes of non-basmati varieties advance 4 percent to 7 million tons, he said in a phone interview.

Shipments are increasing from India as Thailand, once the world’s biggest supplier, is also set to boost exports. The Southeast Asian country has built record stockpiles big enough to meet about a third of global import demand under a buying program that started in 2011. Farmers are demanding the government sell the reserves to pay for their crop.

via Rice Exports From India Climbing to Record on Mideast Demand – Businessweek.

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13/02/2014

Labor Issues Prompt Inquiry into Tata’s Tea – India Real Time – WSJ

Nearly a year after human-rights groups complained about working and living conditions on tea plantations run by Amalgamated Plantations Private Ltd., the World Bank has ordered an inquiry.

APPL, a joint venture of Tata Global Beverages Ltd.500800.BY -1.67% and the International Finance Corp., the private-sector lending arm of the bank, employs around 30,000 people on 20 plantations in the northeastern state of Assam.

Tata Global Beverages owns the Tetley Tea brand.

Rights groups, including People’s Action for Development and Nazdeek, told the bank’s Compliance Advisor Ombudsman that the plantations weren’t adhering to Indian laws.

Many tea workers earn less than $2 a day and it “is impossible to properly feed themselves and their family with this amount of money,” the complaint said. “As a result, many workers suffer from malnutrition.”

Ashoke Bordoloi, chief financial officer of APPL said, “We look after our workers and are compliant with the law.” He said the company would extend “full cooperation” to World Bank auditors.

In 2009, Tata Global Beverages received an investment of $8 million from the IFC to address issues concerning workplace and community health and safety.

But civil rights groups allege that the money hasn’t been used.

“Facilities like living quarters, safe drinking water and toilet facilities and proper education for them, have not yet been provided by the management,” Barnabas Kindo, social activist working with PAJHRA, a group working for improving living conditions of tribal people in the northeast told India Real Time Wednesday.

via Labor Issues Prompt Inquiry into Tata’s Tea – India Real Time – WSJ.

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13/02/2014

Iran asks India for $1.5 bln in oil payments under nuclear deal -sources | Reuters

Iran has asked India for $1.5 billion in back oil payments under the nuclear deal that provides Tehran some relief from Western sanctions, Indian sources with direct knowledge of the matter said on Thursday.

If the payments are approved, this could make India the third of Iran’s major buyers, after Japan and South Korea, to start processing frozen back payments. The payments are contingent on Iran holding to its agreement to start curbing its nuclear programme.

Indian refiners are holding about $3 billion in payments due the Middle Eastern crude producer, one of the sources said.

Other funds owed to Tehran are held in a rupee-denominated account at India’s UCO Bank.

Under the Nov. 24 agreement with six major powers, Iran won access to $4.2 billion of its oil revenues frozen abroad. The fund will be paid out in eight money transfers on a schedule that started with a $550 million payment by Japan on Feb. 1.

via Iran asks India for $1.5 bln in oil payments under nuclear deal -sources | Reuters.

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13/02/2014

For South China Sea claimants, a legal venue to battle China | Reuters

When Philippine President Benigno Aquino compared China to the Germany of 1938 and called for global support as his country battles Beijing’s claims in the South China Sea, he put the focus on a case that Manila has filed in an international court.

Chinese naval soldiers stand guard on China's first aircraft carrier Liaoning, as it travels towards a military base in Sanya, Hainan province, in this undated picture made available on November 30, 2013. Ongoing tensions with the Philippines, Japan and other neighbours over disputed territories in East and South China Sea were heightened by China establishing a new airspace defense zone. REUTERS/Stringer

The Philippines has taken its dispute with China to arbitration under the United Nations’ Convention on the Law of the Sea and its lawyers say that the tribunal has discretionary powers to allow other states to join the action.

China is refusing to participate and has already warned Vietnam against joining the case being heard at the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague, sources have said. Hanoi has so far kept its options open.

Any final ruling by the court on the dispute, one of the most tense flashpoints in Asia, cannot be enforced but will carry considerable moral and political weight, analysts say.

“If a large number of countries, including members of ASEAN, speak out in support of the application of international law to resolve disputes, Beijing might conclude that flouting the ruling of the tribunal is too costly, even if China’s nine-dash line is found to be illegal,” said Bonnie Glaser at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

ASEAN, or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, groups four of the claimants to the sea – Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei and Vietnam – and six other countries in the region.

China, and also Taiwan, claim much of the sea through a nine-dash line on Chinese maps that encompasses about 90 percent of its 3.5 million sq km (1.35 million sq mile) waters. The sea provides 10 percent of the global fisheries catch and carries $5 trillion in ship-borne trade each year.

via For South China Sea claimants, a legal venue to battle China | Reuters.

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12/02/2014

Graft busters under increasing scrutiny in China’s corruption crackdown – Xinhua | English.news.cn

As China’s anti-corruption campaign picks up momentum, those charged with rooting out graft are themselves being placed under increasing scrutiny.

On Tuesday, the Commission for Political and Legal Affairs of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee publicized 10 cases of disciplinary or legal violations by police officers, judges and prosecutors.

“This sends a signal: the disciplinary as well as the political and legal systems are not a sanctuary [in China’s anti-corruption campaign],” said Xin Ming, a professor with the Party School of the CPC Central Committee.

The cases include a Supreme People’s Court official suspected of taking bribes of over 2 million yuan (327,493 U.S. dollars) in exchange for intervening with trials; a prosecutor in central China’s Shanxi Province charged with taking bribes and failing to explain the sources of assets worth over 40 million yuan and 1.8 kg of gold; and a Ministry of Public Security director suspected of taking advantage of his position to benefit others, and accepting bribes of more than 2.23 million yuan.

Publicizing cases is a first for the commission. Previously, corrupt political and legal officials were named and shamed within their own circles.

Only a day before, four discipline officials who worked for the CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) were reported to have been punished for breaking laws and Party anti-graft guidelines.

In the most serious case, Wu Qiang from east China’s Jiangxi Province was stripped of his CPC membership and expelled from public office for drunk driving and killing a pedestrian in 2013.

In another incident, Wu Jimian from central China’s Hubei Province was prosecuted for killing a hotel worker and injuring two others while driving a police car after leaving a banquet.

Shen Wanhao from north China’s Hebei Province was dismissed from his post for beating another discipline official during a banquet.

The fourth official, Ren Jiangang from north China’s Shanxi Province, received a Party warning for holding banquets to commemorate his father’s death and accepting 7,900 yuan in cash.

While these cases may not constitute the powerful “tigers” the CPC vowed to take down in the fresh anti-graft drive, they nevertheless sound an alarm for disciplinary, political and legal officials, said Xin, who added that anti-graft bodies would be more effective and powerful once they fix their internal problems.

“Officials of the discipline, political and legal systems are fighters against corruption and guardians of justice… They cannot do their job if they themselves are crooked,” he said.

via Graft busters under increasing scrutiny in China’s corruption crackdown – Xinhua | English.news.cn.

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12/02/2014

Old palace columns coming home[1]- Chinadaily.com.cn

A Norwegian museum will return seven marble columns, taken about 150 years ago from western Beijing’s Imperial Yuanmingyuan Garden, or the Old Summer Palace.

Old palace columns coming home

The deal was reached under a trilateral agreement made by the museum, Chinese tycoon Huang Nubo and Peking University. The columns will return to China in September and be publicly exhibited at Peking University after maintenance and restoration work.

Huang, chairman of Beijing Zhongkun Investment Group, will donate 10 million Norwegian kroner ($1.63 million) to the museum.

Huang told China Daily that the museum donation is not a trade or “throwing away money”, but “a very meaningful action that shows patriotism, as well as a way of repaying back the mother country, which made me rich”.

Karin Hindsbo, director of the Kode Art Museum in Bergen, told China Daily that “the donation shall be used on academic research and the general care of our collections of Chinese art“.

“A donation like this makes a world of difference for Kode,” Hindsbo said.

Huang said he was invited to visit the art museum in Bergen, Norway’s second-largest city, by then-director Erlend G. Hoyersten when Huang was at a Sino-Scandinavian poets’ exchange event in Norway last year.

“The moment I saw the columns, my eyes teared up. After all, the lost relics from Yuanmingyuan represent an indelible history for all Chinese,” Huang said. “I told the museum staff the relics should not be on show, and they were sympathetic to my feelings.”

During the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), British and French expeditionary forces invaded the garden in 1860, removing its precious imperial collections and burning the rest.

Norwegian cavalry officer Johan W.N. Munthe got some of them from unknown sources and donated 2,500 Chinese artifacts to the Kode museum in the early 20th century.

via Old palace columns coming home[1]- Chinadaily.com.cn.

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12/02/2014

Election season in India comes with freebies – Businessweek

Just before village council elections, Southern Tamil Nadu state Chief Minister J. Jayalalitha went all out to gain favor with rural voters. Schoolgirls received laptops. Farm workers got cows and goats. Homemakers were given spice grinders and fans.

The price tag for the giveaway, which started in 2011 and continues today: 20 billion rupees ($322 million) in a state of about 70 million people.

Freebies are a fact of life in Indian politics, and items like livestock are only part of it. All three parties seen as the front-runners in upcoming elections have enticed voters with subsidies on electricity, cooking gas or grain.

via Election season in India comes with freebies – Businessweek.

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12/02/2014

India Among the Worst for Press Freedom – India Real Time – WSJ

The world’s largest democracy remains one of the most restrictive places for the press.

In a report published Wednesday, Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based think tank, ranked India 140th out of 180 countries surveyed for the free speech it affords the media. This was a one-point jump from the country’s 2013 ranking, when it recorded its steepest fall on the annual-list since 2002.

On Monday, acting on an agreement chalked out by a Delhi court, one of India’s largest publishing houses withdrew a 2009 book that reinterprets Hinduism, the latest instance of a book being removed from circulation in the country.

The authors of Wednesday’s report singled out the insurgency in the disputed territory of Kashmir, where channels of communications, including telephone lines, satellite televisions and the Internet, are routinely suspended in response to unrest, as well as the killings of eight journalists in 2013, for India’s lowly press freedom ranking.  The killings included those of Jitendra Singh, a freelancer in the eastern state of Jharkhand, who documented Maoist activists in the state, and that of Rakesh Sharma, a Hindi newspaper reporter who was shot dead in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, in August.

The People’s Liberation Front of India, a naxalite group, claimed responsibility for Mr. Singh’s death in April. A probe into the shooting of Mr. Sharma is ongoing.

“Those responsible for threats and physical violence against journalists, who are often abandoned by the judicial system and forced to censor themselves, include police and security forces as well as criminal groups, demonstrators and political party supporters,” the think tank said in the report.

The Indian government has also been under fire in recent years for its clampdown on social media.

India’s Supreme Court for instance is currently hearing a defamation suit against tech giants Google and Facebook, a case that’s been pending before courts since 2011. And in 2012, the government sought to block Twitter accounts of some prominent journalists and news organizations, arguing the content was stoking communal tensions. The same year, a Mumbai court charged cartoonist Aseem Trivedi, who likened the national Parliament to a toilet on his website, with sedition, a charge that was later dropped. These, among other reasons, led to India slipping nine places to 140th in Reporters Without Borders’s 2013 press ranking, which surveyed 179 countries.

via India Among the Worst for Press Freedom – India Real Time – WSJ.

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12/02/2014

* H&M to open first store in India in 2014 | Reuters

Hennes & Mauritz will open its first store in India this year, it said on Wednesday, as the world’s second-biggest fashion retailer becomes the latest to take advantage of the opening of Asia’s third-largest economy to foreign operators.

H&M, which said last year it plans to spend around 100 million euros ($137 million) on an initial 50 stores in India, received final approval in December from the Indian government to invest in the country.

“We are very excited to open our first store in India. It is one of the most exciting countries in the world right now, with so much potential,” H&M CEO Karl-Johan Persson said in a statement.

via H&M to open first store in India in 2014 | Reuters.

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