Chindia Alert: You’ll be Living in their World Very Soon
aims to alert you to the threats and opportunities that China and India present. China and India require serious attention; case of ‘hidden dragon and crouching tiger’.
Without this attention, governments, businesses and, indeed, individuals may find themselves at a great disadvantage sooner rather than later.
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NEW DELHI (Reuters) – India sought to boost growth in a federal budget on Saturday that raised spending on farms and expressways and offered cuts inpersonal taxes, but the measures fell short of market expectations and battered stocks.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is grappling with the country’s worst slowdown in a decade, with falling employment, consumption and investment ratcheting up the pressure to revive growth.
The government estimates growth this year to March 31 will slip to 5%, the weakest pace since the global financial crisis of 2008-09. It also warned an expected rebound the following year might entail a blow-out in fiscal deficit targets.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, presenting the budget for the financial year beginning April 1, said 2.83 trillion rupees ($39.8 billion) will be allocated toward agriculture and allied activities, up 5.6 percent on the previous year.
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The funds will be deployed to help farmers set up solar power generation units as well as establish a national cold storage system to transport perishables.
Sitharaman also vowed to spend $50.7 billion in coming years on a federal water scheme to address challenges facing one of the world’s most water-stressed nations.
Agriculture accounts for near 15% of India’s $2.8 trillion economy and is a source of livelihood for more than half of the country’s 1.3 billion population.
Sitharaman announced a new personal tax system including cuts for those ready to give up a myriad of tax breaks. She also abolished payment of dividend distribution tax by companies to spur investment.
“People have reposed faith in our economic policy,” Sitharaman said to the thumping of desks in parliament. “This is a budget to boost their income and enhance their purchasing power.”
Opposition parties slammed the budget, saying it had failed to address the slowdown in consumer demand and investment. “The government is in complete denial that the economy faces a grave macro economic challenge,” said former finance minister P. Chidambaram.
But higher government spending has put pressure on public finances, prompting caution from rating agencies. Sitharaman said the fiscal deficit for the current year would widen to 3.8% of GDP, up from 3.3% targeted for the current year.
Gene Fang, associate managing director, sovereign risk at Moody’s, said: “India’s 2020/21 budget highlights the challenges to fiscal consolidation from slower real and nominal growth, which may continue for longer than the government forecasts.”
GOVERNMENT SPENDING
For fiscal 2020/21 Sitharaman set the fiscal deficit at 3.5 percent. Moody’s said India’s government debt is already significantly higher than the average for Baa-rated sovereigns, a product of persistent fiscal deficits.
To help finance government spending, Sitharaman set a target for selling stakes in state firms at 2.1 trillion rupees for 2020/21, more than three times the amount expected this year.
She said the government will sell a part of its holding in state-run Life Insurance Corp, the country’s biggest insurance company.
But many experts said the measures did not go far enough to address the slowdown and structural flaws.
“In a normal scenario this budget would have been considered as good providing tax benefit to the common man, corporate and focus on farmers’ incomes, but the situation required more,” said Vinod Nair, head of research at Geojit Financial Services in Kochi.
Indian shares slid to a more than three-month low after a special trading session on Saturday, dented by what analysts said was a lack of sufficient stimulus measures. The NSE Nifty 50 index .NSEI closed 2.5% lower while the benchmark S&P BSE Sensex .BSESN fell 2.4%
“Markets had very high expectations from the budget … these expectations have not been met,” said Deepak Jasani of HDFC Securities.
The government also announced higher duties on a host of imports from walnuts to phone parts. Taxes on imports of pre-assembled printed circuit boards were raised to 20% from 10% and there were new taxes on mobile phones ringers and display panels in a bid to boost local manufacturing.
In its annual economic report released on Friday the government predicted growth would rebound to 6.0% to 6.5% in the fiscal year beginning April 1.
Some economists say global trade tensions and the outbreak of coronavirus in China pose a new risk to economic recovery by hitting cross-border commerce and supply chains.
Image copyright AFPImage caption The majority of the 7,100 cheetahs left in the world are in Africa
India’s top court has said cheetahs can be reintroduced in the country, 70 years after they were wiped out.
Responding to a plea by the government, the Supreme Court said African cheetahs could be introduced to the wild in a “carefully chosen location”.
Cheetahs are an endangered species, according to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites).
Only 7,100 cheetahs are left in the wild, almost all of them in Africa.
The Asiatic cheetah, which once roamed parts of India, is now only found in Iran, where there are thought to be about 50 left.
India’s Supreme Court said the animal would have to be introduced on an experimental basis to find out if it could adapt to Indian conditions.
Studies show that at least 200 cheetahs were killed in India, largely by sheep and goat herders, during the colonial period. It is the only large mammal to become extinct after the country gained independence in 1947.
India’s former environment minister Jairam Ramesh welcomed the decision to reintroduce the animal.
Delighted that Supreme Court has just given OK to reintroducing cheetah from Namibia. This was something I had initiated 10 years ago. Cheetah which derives from the Sanskrit ‘chitra’ (speckled) is the only mammal hunted to extinction in modern India.
For more than a decade, wildlife officials, cheetah experts and conservationists from all over the world have discussed the reintroduction of the spotted big cat to India and have agreed that there is a strong case for it.
But leading conservationists have harboured doubts about the plan. They fear that in its haste to bring back the cheetah, India will end up housing the animals in semi-captive conditions in huge, secured open air zoos rather than allowing them to live free.
They add that without restoring habitat and prey base, and given the high chances of a man-animal conflict, viable cheetah populations cannot be established.
They have also pointed to India’s chequered record of reintroducing animals to the wild.
Lions were reintroduced in the Chandraprabha sanctuary in northern Uttar Pradesh state in the 1950s, but were then poached out of existence.
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However, conservationists who have led the initiative insist that these fears are unfounded. They say a decision will only be taken after shortlisted sites are fully examined for habitat, prey and potential for man-animal conflict.
The first cheetah in the world to be bred in captivity was in India during the rule of Mughal emperor Jahangir. His father, Akbar, recorded that there were 10,000 cheetahs during his time.
Much later, research showed that were at least 230 cheetahs in India between 1799 and 1968 – and the cat was reportedly sighted for the last time in the country in 1967-68.
NEW DELHI (Reuters) – India said on Monday it plans to sell its entire interest in Air India Ltd, making a renewed push to sell the flag carrier after it drew no bids in an effort to auction a majority stake almost two years ago.
A document released on Monday showed March 17 as the deadline for submission of initial expressions of interest, and that any bidder must assume liabilities, including debt of 232.87 billion rupees ($3.28 billion).
Substantial ownership and effective control of the airline must remain with an Indian entity, the government added.
The potential sale of an airline kept aloft by a $4.2 billion 10-year bailout in 2012 comes as the government divests money-losing assets to manage the fiscal deficit.
The latest offer should garner significant response partly because it involves a clean exit by the government, said CAPA aviation consultancy India head Kapil Kaul.
“As the entire debt excluding aircraft debt is taken out of the deal, it signals a very determined effort to exit Air India, to allow taxpayers’ funds be utilized for the government’s social agenda,” said Kaul.
Indian business house Hinduja Group and US-based fund Interups have expressed interest in buying the airline, the Business Standard daily said.
It quoted Laxmi Prasad, the chairman and chief business architect of Interups, as saying the fund had initiated talks with the government and would like to make a case for certain aspects of the airline’s business to be included in the deal.
The government in 2018 here tried to sell 76% of Air India and offload about $5.1 billion of its debt, with terms including the retention of all employees.
InterGlobe Aviation Ltd’s (INGL.NS) IndiGo and Jet Airways Ltd (JET.NS) – which has since collapsed – initially showed interest, but opted out after the terms were disclosed.
Steel-to-autos conglomerate Tata Group, widely viewed as a potential suitor for Air India, also decided not to bid after deeming the terms too onerous, sources told Reuters at the time.
On Monday, civil aviation minister Hardeep Singh Puri said the government was open to suggestions and altering some provisions if the changes helped to find a buyer.
“We have gone into this exercise, months of planning and preparation have gone into it and this is not the final, final. The bidders are going to get 45 days, they are going to come back to us. It is an interactive process,” Puri told reporters.
“We are open to revising, refining and tweaking our views.”
A successful bidder would win control of Air India’s 4,400 domestic and 1,800 international landing and parking slots at domestic airports, as well as 900 slots at airports overseas.
It would also get 100% of low-cost arm Air India Express and 50% of AISATS, which provides cargo and ground handling services at major Indian airports, the bid document showed.
The buyer would also have to provide 3% of the value of the airline’s equity as stock options for permanent employees.
Air India has about 9,400 permanent employees and 3,600 fixed-term contract staff – including 1,850 pilots and 4,600 cabin crew – with benefits such as discounted air tickets and pensions.
Its employees protested against the 2018 sale attempt, and it was not immediately clear if they would also resist the latest effort. The government said it would provide details on safeguarding employee interests in its final bid document.
A spokesman for the employee union did not have immediate comment.
The government’s divestment plan could also face opposition from within, with Subramanian Swamy, an MP from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), threatening legal action against the sale.
“This deal is wholly anti-national and I will (be) forced to go to court. We cannot sell our family silver,” Swamy said on Twitter.
(Reuters) – India and Brazil have signed 15 accords aimed at forging closer ties between the two emerging market giants across a range of sectors, especially defence, both countries’ leaders tweeted on Saturday.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro took to social media to hail the closer cooperation and agreements struck during Bolsonaro’s official visit to India.
“Several agreements signed in infrastructure, justice, science and technology, agriculture, oil exploration, mining, health, culture and tourism,” Bolsonaro tweeted, adding: “The world’s confidence in Brazil is back!”
For his part, Modi tweeted: “India and Brazil are focussing on expanding cooperation in the defence sector,” adding that the two countries share “immense synergies” on several key issues such as the environment and fighting terrorism.
Separately, Brazil’s foreign minister Ernesto Araujo tweeted that the 15 accords signed by the two countries represent a move “against the structures of globalist thought”.
“Brazil is rising to be a great among the greats,” he tweeted.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, visits a village of the Wa ethnic group to extend his Chinese New Year’s greetings to the villagers in Qingshui Township of the city of Tengchong, southwest China’s Yunnan Province, Jan. 19, 2020. Xi visited Yunnan Province Sunday on an inspection tour ahead of Chinese New Year. (Xinhua/Ju Peng)
KUNMING, Jan. 19 (Xinhua) — Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, visited southwest China’s Yunnan Province Sunday on an inspection tour ahead of Chinese New Year.
Xi went to a village of the Wa ethnic group in Qingshui Township of the city of Tengchong Sunday afternoon to learn about poverty alleviation efforts and extend his Chinese New Year’s greetings to the villagers.
He also visited the old town of Heshun, a gateway on the ancient Southern Silk Road that linked China’s Sichuan and Yunnan with Myanmar and India, to learn about exchanges, historical and cultural inheritance, as well as ecological and environmental protection along the trade route.
KUALA LUMPUR/NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Trade ministers from India and Malaysia are likely to meet on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos next week amid a palm oil spat between the two countries, a Malaysian government spokesman told Reuters on Friday.
Hindu-majority India has repeatedly objected to Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad speaking out against its recent policies which critics say discriminate against Muslims.
Malaysia, a Muslim-majority nation, is the second biggest producer and exporter of palm oil and India’s restrictions on the refined variety of the commodity imposed last week have been seen as a retaliation for Mahathir’s criticism of New Delhi’s actions.
India’s trade minister Piyush Goyal denied on Thursday that the government was trying to hit out at Malaysia in particular.
The row between the countries, nevertheless, pushed benchmark Malaysian palm futures to its biggest weekly decline in more than 11 years on Friday.
No agenda has been set for the proposed meeting between Goyal and his Malaysian counterpart Darell Leiking on Friday, the spokesman for Malaysia’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry said, adding that the request for a meeting had come from India.
An Indian government source said a meeting was indeed likely with Leiking. A spokeswoman for India’s trade ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
Reuters reported on Thursday that Malaysia did not want to escalate the palm spat with India by talking of any retaliation for now, after Mahathir’s media adviser called for tighter regulations on Indian expatriates and products. Malaysia instead wants to rely on diplomacy.
A separate Indian government source said it was important for New Delhi also to talk things out with Malaysia.
“We too have a lot to lose in Malaysia, there are 2 million Indian-origin people there,” the source said.
There were a total of 117,733 Indian nationals registered as foreign labour in Malaysia as at June 2019, accounting for nearly 6% of the total foreign workforce in the country. Ethnic Malaysian-Indians are the third-largest community in the Southeast Asian country.
Another reason for frosty ties between the countries is the continued presence of controversial Indian Islamic preacher Zakir Naik in Malaysia, said one of the sources.
Naik, who faces charges of money laundering and hate speech in India, has lived in Malaysia for more than three years and has permanent residency in the country. He denies the Indian accusations.
The sources declined to be identified as they were not authorised to talk to the media.
Visiting Chinese special representative, State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi (L) shakes hands with Indian special representative and National Security Advisor Ajit Doval at the 22nd meeting between Chinese and Indian special representatives on boundary issues in New Delhi, India, Dec. 21, 2019. (Xinhua/Javed Dar)
NEW DELHI, Dec. 21 (Xinhua) — China and India agreed here Saturday to enhance mutual political trust so as to properly handle border issues and jointly safeguard peace and tranquility in the border areas.
At the 22nd meeting between Chinese and Indian special representatives on boundary issues, visiting Chinese special representative, State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi said the annual meeting serves as a main channel for the two countries to discuss border issues, and it is also an important platform for the two sides to carry out strategic communication.
China and India should positively press forward the talks on border issues in accordance with the important instructions made by the leaders of the two countries, and work out the framework of the negotiation roadmap in a bid to reach a final solution which is fair, reasonable and accepted by both sides, Wang said.
In addition, both sides should also advance consultations which can yield early results, promote mutual trust and enhance cooperation in the border areas so as to jointly safeguard peace and tranquility in the border areas, Wang said.
The two countries should further strengthen communication and coordination, and jointly safeguard multilateralism, fairness and justice, Wang added.
Indian special representative and National Security Advisor Ajit Doval said Chinese and Indian leaders have provided a new vision and strategic guidance for the development of bilateral ties and the solution of boundary issues.
Both sides should comprehensively implement the important consensus reached by the two leaders, strengthen strategic communication, enhance political mutual trust, deepen mutually beneficial cooperation, solve the China-India boundary issues at an early date through dialogue and negotiation, so as to promote India-China relationship to gain further development.
The two sides exchanged views on the early harvest of boundary negotiations, reached consensus on strengthening trust measures, and agreed to make regulations on safeguarding peace and tranquility in border areas, enhance communication and exchanges between the border troops of the two countries, as well as expand border trade and personnel exchanges.
The two sides also agreed to hold the 23nd Special Representatives’ Meeting on the China-India Boundary Question next year in China.
NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Violent clashes erupted in Delhi between police and hundreds of university students on Friday over the enactment of a new citizenship law that critics say undermines India’s secular foundations.
The unrest has already led Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to cancel a planned visit to India from Sunday.
The new law offers a way to Indian citizenship for six minority religious groups from neighbouring Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan including Hindus and Christians, but not Muslims.
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Police fired tear gas and used baton charges to disperse scores of students demonstrating at Jamia Millia Islamia university in the heart of Delhi over the law.
Protesters attacked cars in the capital, and several people were injured and taken to hospital.
Zakir Riyaz, a PhD student in social work, said the new law made a mockery of India’s religious openness.
“It goes against the whole idea of a secular India,” he said, speaking by phone from the Holy Family Hospital in New Delhi where 15 of his fellow students were admitted after being injured in a police baton charge.
Police barricades were knocked down and streets were strewn with shoes and broken bricks. An official at the university dispensary said that more than 100 students had been brought in with injuries but all had been discharged.
Parvez Hashmi, a local politician who went to the protest site to speak to police, said about 50 students had been detained.
Students said it was meant to be a peaceful protest, with them trying to go from Jamia University to Parliament Street to show their opposition to the legislation. But police pushed them back, leading to clashes.
Critics of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government say it is promoting a Hindu-first agenda for India and that the citizenship law excluding Muslims showed a deep-seated bias against India’s 170 million Muslims.
Imran Chowdhury, a researcher, said “either give citizenship to refugees of all religions or none at all. The constitution is being tampered with in the name of religion.”
Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party denies any religious bias but says it is opposed to the appeasement of one community. It says the new law is meant to help minority groups facing persecution in the three nearby Muslim countries.
ABE CANCELS
The United Nations human rights office voiced concern that the new law is “fundamentally discriminatory in nature”, and called for it to be reviewed.
Two people were killed in India’s Assam state on Thursday when police opened fire on mobs torching buildings and attacking railway stations in protest at the new citizenship rules signed into law on Thursday.
Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe cancelled a trip to Assam for a summit with his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi that had been due to begin on Sunday.
Japan has stepped up infrastructure development work in Assam in recent years, which the two sides were expected to highlight during the summit. Abe had also planned to visit a memorial in the nearby state of Manipur where Japanese soldiers were killed in World War Two.
“With reference to the proposed visit of Japanese PM Abe Shinzo to India, both sides have decided to defer the visit to a mutually convenient date in the near future,” Indian foreign ministry spokesman Raveesh Kumar said in a tweet.
Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said both countries would decide on the appropriate timing for the visit although nothing has been decided yet.
A movement against immigrants from Bangladesh has raged in Assam for decades. Protesters there say granting Indian nationality to more people will further strain the state’s resources and lead to the marginalisation of indigenous communities.
Comic crusader Priya, a gang-rape survivor who earlier campaigned against rape and acid attack, is back in a new avatar. This time she is fighting the trafficking of girls and women for sex.
The “modern-day female superhero” was first launched in December 2014, exactly two years after the horrific gang rape of a young woman on a bus in Delhi, to focus attention on the problems of gender and sexual violence in India.
In the latest edition – Priya and the Lost Girls – she takes on the powerful sex-trafficker Rahu, the evil demon who runs an underworld brothel city where he has entrapped many women, including Priya’s sister Lakshmi.
Indian-American actor and writer Dipti Mehta, who wrote the script of the comic, draws on ancient Indian mythology to create larger-than-life fantastical characters and delivers a powerful feminist statement.
The story of Lost Girls begins when the protagonist returns home to find that there are no girls in her village.
She then mounts her flying tiger Sahas (Hindi for courage) and arrives in Rahu’s den. It’s a city ruled by greed, jealousy and lust, where women exist only to serve and please men – and those who resist are turned into stone.
Image copyright PRIYASHAKTI
Priya is threatened and attacked, a woman who works for Rahu tries to lure her into the sex trade saying: “If you work for us, you’d serve only five to six men and not 20”, but in the end, good wins over evil and she manages to vanquish Rahu and liberate her sister and all the other trafficked girls.
But victory still eludes her. The families of rescued girls refuse to take them back. The survivors are treated like “lepers”, facing stigma, scorn and ridicule.
But Priya and the other girls stand up to confront patriarchy, says Ms Mehta, “just as women have broken their silence to talk about MeToo”, the campaign against sexual harassment and abuse that started in Hollywood in October 2107 and later spread to many other parts of the world.
“I was very clear from the start that Lost Girls can’t be just another comic book where good guy wins and evil dies, it had to be much more than that,” Ms Mehta says.
Image copyright PRIYASHAKTI
Ram Devineni, the Indian-American creator of the comic series, told the BBC that he had decided to focus on sex trafficking in this edition after visiting Sonagachi, India’s largest red-light area in the eastern city of Kolkata, where he met several women engaged in sex work.
“Half of them told me they had been tricked into coming there and, once there, they were forced into the sex trade. The other half said they’d agreed to do this for a living because they were dirt poor and they had no alternative.
“Often there were two to three women sharing a small dingy room, many of them had young children who lived with them, and some of them said their children slept in the same bed where they serviced clients.
Mr Devineni says that from his conversations with them, he realised that many of the women there could leave, but chose not to.
“Most believed in the idea of sacrifice, for the sake of their families, their children. The shackles that hold them back are mostly emotional and psychological coercion.”
Some of their stories, he says, have found their way into the Lost Girls, which will be launched digitally on Monday to coincide with the start of United Nation’s 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-based Violence.
Image copyright PRIYASHAKTIAccording to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, human trafficking is the second largest organised criminal business in the world after the arms trade. It is even ahead of the drugs trade.
“It’s a multi-billion-dollar industry,” anti-trafficking activist Ruchira Gupta told the BBC on the phone from New York.
Ms Gupta, who supports trafficked girls and women in India through her charity Apne Aap Women Worldwide, says there are 100 million people trapped in human trafficking globally, of which 27 million are in India alone, and most of the trafficking is in girls and young women.
India, Bangladesh and Nepal, she says, make up “the epicentre” of global sex trafficking.
Ms Gupta, who collaborated on Priya and the Lost Girls, says she plans to take the comic to schools and colleges in India and the US to use it as a talking tool, “as a conversation starter on what is a very difficult topic”.
The only way to fight trafficking, she believes, is to “de-normalise” sex trade – and cinema, art and pop culture are tools that can help do that.
The comic is made to appeal to young people. After its launch, it can be downloaded for free anywhere in the world; it also has “augmented reality features”, which means people can see special animation and movies by scanning the artwork with their smartphones.
Image copyright PRIYASHAKTI
“People often make flippant comments to say that prostitution is the oldest occupation in the world, but they don’t realise that trafficking is not some poor woman getting money in exchange for having sex with a man. It is the extreme exploitation of most vulnerable girls,” Ms Gupta says.
To stop this “commodification” of girls, she adds, we need to create revulsion in men’s minds about sex trade – and it’s best to catch them young.
“We must work with young boys and teenagers, 13 to 14 year olds, through storytelling and pop culture. They learn about sex from porn sites which portray sex workers as happy hookers, and no-one sees the girl behind her.
“I want to demolish that myth of the happy hooker. I want to ensure that people see the girl behind her.”
Artwork by Syd Fini and Neda Kazemifar
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CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 