New Delhi, Nov 23 :More than 93 per cent of the five lakh people who participated in a survey on Narendra Modi App have supported demonetisation, the PMO said today a day after the Prime Minister sought public feedback on the issue.
“I thank people for the historic participation in the survey. It’s satisfying to read the insightful views & comments,” the Prime Minister tweeted along with the results of the survey conducted on Narendra Modi App.
“Unprecedented response to App Survey, record number of citizens share their view,” said the title of a write-up on narendramodi.in whose link was shared by the Prime Minister on his twitter account.
The survey result was read out by IT and Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad at Cabinet meeting this evening, prompting the Prime Minister to say that it “reflects the mood” of the people.
In just over 24 hours of the survey, more than 5 lakh people have participated and expressed their opinion, it said, adding “This is a staggering number by any stretch. No opinion survey conducted in India, on such policy or political issues, even comes close to sampling so many responses.”
More than 93 per cent people support the move to demonetize the old 500 and 1000 rupee notes, it said. Of the over 5 lakh responses so far, only 2 per cent have rated the move as ‘very poor’ or ‘one star’, the survey result said.
More than 90 per cent of the respondents feel the government s move to tackle black money is above four-star rating, the survey result says. 73 per cent of them give it five-star rating of ‘brilliant’.
On the overall fight against corruption, more than 92 per cent of respondents either rate the government as ‘very good’ or ‘good’ while 57 per cent of them rate the fight as ‘very good’.
“As high as 86 per cent people believe that some so- called anti-corruption activists are now actually batting in support of black money, corruption and even terrorist financing!”, the write-up said.
Washington, Nov 22 (PTI) Sick of smelly toilets, Microsoft founder Bill Gates has funded the development of an odour-blocking perfume that smells like poop as part of an ambitious effort to develop stink-free toilets and improve poor sanitation across India and Africa.
The billionaire philanthropist’s ‘The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’ partnered with a Swiss-based perfume company ‘Firmenich’ to create a poop smell blocker with the hope to make smelly toilets a thing of past and make a difference in communities with poor sanitation.
Noting that one billion people had no access to toilets and defecate in the open, 61-year-old Gates said three billion have toilets but their waste is dumped untreated, seeping into water and food supplies, leading to many diseases and slow economic growth.
“Beyond the tremendous human suffering, it’s a problem that slows economic development. In India alone, poor sanitation costs nearly USD 55 billion each year more than 6 per cent of GDP,” Gates wrote on his Gates Notes blog.
“Millions of new toilets are being built around the world to help end open defecation, including in India where a massive new toilet construction program is currently underway.
This is great news.
“Unfortunately, many of these new toilets, especially the pit latrines, don’t get used because they smell bad and people continue to relieve themselves in the open. This is a worrying trend that threatens to undermine the progress that’s been achieved in global sanitation,” he said.
While pleasant fragrances are often used to cover tough odours, Firmenich decided to try a different and “more sophisticated approach” to get rid of the toilet stink.
It managed to isolate the four chemical compounds that are responsible for the terrible smell in toilets, and recreated the odour using synthetic compounds.
It used the “poop perfume” to develop fragrances that block certain olfactory receptors in our noses, making us unable to register these bad smells.
The approach is similar to noise-cancelling headphones which many people use to block out jet engine noise on flights, Gates wrote.
“I had an opportunity to experience the odour-blocking fragrances in action. I was invited to push my nose into a glass sniffing tube and breathe in a mixture of the poop perfume. It smelled pretty good. There was no evidence of repulsive odour I had experienced earlier,” he said.
“The question now is whether this technology is good enough to make a difference in communities with poor sanitation. That’s why Firmenich is launching pilot projects in communities across India and Africa to understand whether the fragrances will make toilets and pit latrines more inviting for users,” Gates said.
He said the company also needed to determine if it is better to distribute the fragrance as a spray, a powder, or something else.
“The ultimate goal is to make the product affordable and easy-to-use,” he said.
TOKYO – Coastal residents fled to higher ground as a powerful earthquake sent a series of moderate tsunamis toward Japan’s northeastern shore Tuesday and fueled concerns about the Fukushima nuclear power plant destroyed by a much larger tsunami five year ago.
Lines of cars snaked away from the coast in the pre-dawn hours after authorities issued a tsunami warning and urged residents to seek higher ground immediately. The warning was lifted nearly four hours later.
The magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck in the same region that was devastated by a tsunami that followed a much larger magnitude 9.0 quake in 2011, killing some 18,000 people. The U.S. Geological Survey measured Tuesday’s quake at 6.9.
It was the largest earthquake in northeastern Japan since the 2011 one and some large aftershocks the same day.
At least 12 people were reported injured, and Japanese TV images showed items scattered on the floor in a store, and books that had fallen from shelves in a library. The earthquake shook buildings in Tokyo, 240 kilometers (150 miles) southwest of the epicenter.
The Japan Meteorological Agency described it as an aftershock of the massive 2011 quake. It warned that another large earthquake could hit in the next few days and urged residents to remain cautious for about a week.
“Aftershocks could continue not only for five years but as long as 100 years,” Yasuhiro Umeda, a Kyoto University seismologist, said on a talk show on Japanese broadcaster NTV.
The meteorological agency said the bigger the earthquake, the longer the aftershocks last, though it didn’t say how long.
In some areas, water could be seen rushing up rivers, which funnel tsunamis to a greater height, but it remained well within flood embankments. It was eerily reminiscent of the 2011 disaster, when much larger tsunamis rushed up rivers and overflowed, wiping away entire neighborhoods.
The first tsunami waves hit about one hour after the earthquake. The highest one, 1.4 meters (4.6 feet) in height, reached Sendai Bay about two hours after the quake.
The operator of the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant said there were no abnormalities observed at the plant, though a swelling of the tide of up to 1 meter was detected offshore.
The plant was swamped by the 2011 tsunami, sending three reactors into meltdown and leaking radiation into the surrounding area. The plant is being decommissioned but the situation remains serious as the utility figures out how to remove still-radioactive fuel rods and debris and what to do with the melted reactor cores.
Plant operator TEPCO said a pump that supplies cooling water to a spent fuel pool at the nearby Fukushima Dai-ni plant stopped working, but that a backup pump had been launched to restore cooling water to the pool. Both plants are run by Tokyo-based TEPCO.
Naohiro Masuda, head of TEPCO’s decommissioning unit, said he believes that the pump was shut off automatically by a safety system as the water in the pool shook.
He said decommissioning work at the destroyed Dai-ichi plant had been temporarily suspended because of the earthquake.
For many, the early morning jolt brought back memories of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
“I remembered 3/11,” Kazuhiro Onuki said by phone, referring to the March 11 date of the 2011 disaster. “It really came back. And it was so awful. The sways to the side were huge. But nothing fell from shelves.”
The 68-year-old former librarian is from Tomioka, a town that became a no-go zone because of radiation contamination. He was staying at what he calls one of his temporary homes on Tuesday.
“I felt again that we should not have nuclear power,” he said.
With more people than ever before migrating to cities, finding a toilet is not only a chore but a public health issue for hundreds of millions of people around the world, WaterAid, a sanitation charity, said on Thursday. Nearly one in five city dwellers, or about 700 million people worldwide do not have access to decent toilets, according to the Britain-based WaterAid.
About 600 million people use dirty or crowded communal toilets and pit or bucket latrines, while some 100 million have no facilities at all, it said. Ensuring sanitation for all by 2030 was among the global development goals adopted last year by the 193 members of the United Nations.
* India has the highest number of urban dwellers who do not have access to safe and private toilets – 157 million people.
* Eight Olympic-sized swimming pools could be filled daily with excrement produced by India’s 41 million urban residents who must defecate in the open.
* The 10 countries with the most urban dwellers lacking access to safe and private toilets are: India, China, Nigeria, Indonesia, Russia, Bangladesh, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Brazil, Ethiopia and Pakistan.
* The 10 countries with the least number of safe and private toilets per capita in urban areas are all located in Africa. In descending order, they are South Sudan, Madagascar, the Republic of Congo, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Togo, Ethiopia, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda.
* Defecating in the open is most common in South Sudan, followed by the West African island nation of Sao Tome and Principe, Eritrea, Liberia, Benin, Namibia, the South Pacific island nation of Kiribati, Togo, Madagascar and Nigeria.
* China, the world’s most populated country, is building toilets faster than the demand created by new urban arrivals, who number about 329 million since 2000.
* Nigeria, Africa’s biggest economy, is furthest behind in responding to the needs of urban dwellers for toilets. Since 2000, only one in three urban residents in the West African nation have had access to toilets.
* The line of people who lack access to decent toilets would stretch around the earth 29 times.
* Diarrhea resulting from poor sanitation such as inadequate toilets and dirty water kills 315,000 children yearly, according to estimates by WASHwatch, an online project that collects data on water and sanitation.
Lodha panel submitted status report to the apex court of the country seeking SC nod to remove all BCCI office bearers from their post for failing to implement its recommendations.
The panel recommended that GK Pillai, former Union Home Secretary be appointed appointed as an observer to oversee the administration of the cricket board. The committee also wanted SC nod to empower the observer to appoint secretarial staff, assistance and fix remuneration.
The BCCI-Lodha tussle has been going on for a long time with the cricket board of the country reluctant to implement most of the recommendations of the Supreme Court-appointed panel.
New Delhi, Nov 21 : State-owned ONGC and Oil India as also Reliance Industries and BP plc today skipped the auction of 46 discovered small oil and gas fields, with only 34 areas attracting bids.
The state-owned firms had initially indicated that they will bid for the fields, which were said to have been “surrendered” by them as they were commercially unviable under the price control regime. But new liberal fiscal terms had made these viable and the PSUs wanted to get them back.
The two however had not offered any bids by the time the round closed for the day and the reason offered was that since they had originally surrendered them, it did not make any sense to bid for these fields.
Sources said as many as 42 bids were received for 34 out of the 46 fields on offer, with Cairn India and Hindustan Oil Exploration Co (HOEC) being the major bidders alongside five smaller foreign firms.
BP plc, the biggest foreign investor in the oil and gas sector in India, as also Reliance Industries did not bid in the round that was also skipped by global energy giants like Exxon Mobil and Chevron.
Magna Energy too, the firm floated by maverick oil explorer Mike Watts who gave India its largest oilfield in Rajasthan, did not bid even though it was betting big on the country.
While Oil Minister Dharmendra Pradhan travelled the globe – from Singapore to Houston – to get investors for the first oil field auction round in over four years, big giants sat out primarily due to small size of acreage being offered and the overheads required to bring them to production.
Launching the auction round in May, Pradhan had stated that Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC) and Oil India Ltd (OIL) would be able to bid for the fields on offer.
But the two firms were reportedly asked not to bid as private and foreign investors thought they would not be able to compete with the might of state-owned firms with inside knowledge of the fields.
As many as 67 idle discoveries, primarily of ONGC, were clubbed to form 46 fields for offer in the so-called Small Discovered Field round, bids for which closed today. Of these, 26 are on-land, 18 shallow water and 2 deepwater fields.
The fields hold an in-place reserves of 48 million tonnes of oil and over 38 billion cubic metres of gas reserves, worth Rs 70,000 crore at current prices.
Sources said the government took away these discoveries from ONGC as it could not develop them because of small size and unviable price.
But in the bidding round, the government is offering complete pricing freedom and liberal fiscal terms.
The fields offered included 28 discoveries in Mumbai offshore, 14 are in the prolific Krishna Godavari basin and 10 discoveries in the Assam shelf.
Saddled with mounting bad loans, as many as 16 public sector banks, including Punjab National Bank, Bank of Baroda and Canara Bank, skipped paying dividend in 2015-16, leading to three-fold decline in government receipts to Rs 1,444.6 crore.
Only six state-owned banks including SBI declared dividend, though at a lower rate, for the fiscal ended March 2016.
Under the existing guidelines, profit making banks have to pay a minimum dividend of 20% of their equity or 20% of their post tax profit, whichever is higher.
The government, which is the majority shareholder in all the public sector banks, witnessed 67% decline in dividend receipt from PSU banks at Rs 1,444.6 crore as against Rs 4,336.22 crore in the previous fiscal.
According to Finance Ministry data, the highest dividend was paid by SBI to government at Rs 1,214.6 crore during 2015-16, 22% lower than the previous fiscal.
As regards Union Bank of India, the dividend payout was one-third of the previous fiscal at Rs 85 crore. For Oriental Bank of Commerce, it was one-fifth compared to the previous financial year at Rs 12.4 crore despite increase in government holding due to capital infusion.
Those which skipped dividend payments included Allahabad Bank, Bank of Baroda, Bank of India, Canara Bank, Central Bank of India, Corporation Bank, Punjab National Bank, Dena Bank and Syndicate Bank.
Balance sheet of most of the banks were under stress due to clean-up exercise. Due to heavy provisioning for bad loans, many banks posted losses during the last quarter of the previous fiscal.
Gross NPAs of the PSBs had surged from 5.43% (Rs 2.67 lakh crore) in 2014-15 to 9.32% (Rs 4.76 lakh crore) in 2015-16 of the total advances.
Banks have been given time till March 2017 to clean up their balance sheet.
New Delhi, Nov 20 : The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has proposed opening of “Islamic window” in conventional banks for “gradual” introduction of Sharia-compliant or interest-free banking in the country.
Both the Centre and RBI are exploring the possibility of introduction of Islamic banking for long to ensure financial inclusion of those sections of the society that remain excluded due to religious reasons.
“In our considered opinion, given the complexities of Islamic finance and various regulatory and supervisory challenges involved in the matter and also due to the fact that Indian banks have no experience in this field, Islamic banking may be introduced in India in a gradual manner.
“Initially, a few simple products which are similar to conventional banking products may be considered for introduction through Islamic window of the conventional banks after necessary notification by the government.
“Introduction of full-fledged Islamic banking with profit-loss sharing complex products may be considered at a later stage on the basis of experience gained in course of time,” the RBI has told Finance Ministry in a letter, a copy of which was received in response to an RTI query filed by PTI.
Islamic or Sharia banking is a finance system based on the principles of not charging interest, which is prohibited under Islam.
“It is also our understanding that interest-free banking for financial inclusion will require a proper process of the product being certified as Sharia compliant will be required both on the asset and liability side and the funds received under the interest-free banking could not be mingled with other funds and therefore, this banking will have to be conducted under a separate window,” it said.
The central bank’s proposal is based on examination of legal, technical and regulatory issues regarding feasibility of introducing Islamic banking in India on the basis of recommendation of the Inter Departmental Group (IDG).
RBI has also prepared a technical analysis report which has been sent to the Finance Ministry.
“In case it is decided to introduce Islamic banking product in India as suggested, RBI would require to undertake further work to put in place the operational and regulatory framework to facilitate introduction of such products by banks in India,” the letter said. .