New Delhi, Mar;1: The government approved the continuation of Prime Minister’s Employment Generation Programme (PMEGP) beyond the 12th Plan period for three years to 2019-20 with a total outlay of Rs 5,500 crore.
The scheme will create sustainable estimated employment opportunities for 15 lakh persons in three financial years.
The decision was taken at a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi here.
The Khadi and Village Industries Commission (KVIC) is the nodal implementation agency for the PMEGP at the national level. At the state/district level, state offices of KVIC, Khadi and Village Industries Boards (KVIBs) and District Industry Centres (DIC) are the implementing agencies.
“A minimum target of 75 projects/district is awarded to all districts of the country to achieve inclusive growth. Higher rate of subsidy (25-35 per cent) will be applicable for women, SC/ST, OBC, Physically Disabled, NER applicants in rural areas,” an official statement said.
The applications are invited and processed online on the PMEGP-e-portal. The scheme’s targets are fixed taking into account the extent of backwardness of state; extent of unemployment; extent of fulfilment of previous year targets; population of state/union territory; and availability of traditional skills and raw material.
PMEGP is a major credit-linked subsidy programme being implemented by the Ministry of MSME since 2008-09. The Scheme is aimed at generating self-employment opportunities through establishment of micro-enterprises in the non-farm sector by helping traditional artisans and unemployed youth in rural as well as urban areas.
A total of 4.55 lakh micro enterprises have been assisted with a margin money subsidy of Rs 9,564.02 crore providing employment to an estimated 37.98 lakh persons from inception till January 31, 2018.
Modification made in the scheme include a second loan of up to Rs 1 crore to existing and better performing PMEGP units for upgrading with subsidy of 15 per cent; Mandatory Aadhaar and Pan card and Geo-tagging of units.
The negative list under PMEGP had also been amended allowing serving/selling non-vegetarian food at Hotels/Dhabas and Off Farm/Farm Linked activities.
New Delhi, Feb 28: The total foodgrains output for 2017-18 is estimated at a record 277.49 million tonnes despite expected decline in the production of wheat and oilseeds, as per the 2nd Advance Estimates of Foodgrains Production released by the Union Agriculture Ministry here on Tuesday.
Last year’s total foodgrains output was 275.11 million tonnes.
The output of wheat is expected to be lower by 1.40 million tonnes compared to the previous best of 98.51 million tonnes in 2016-17. This year wheat output is expected to be 97.11 million tonnes mainly because of lower sown area.
Coarse cereals output is estimated at a record 45.42 million tonnes against 43.77 million tonnes last year, while total oilseeds output is expected to be 29.88 million tonnes which is lower by 1.39 million tonnes than last year.
The output of rice is expected to be 109.70 million tonnes, 1.31 million tonnes higher than last year.
The total pulses production is likely to be a record 23.95 million compared to 23.13 million tonnes last year.
With a significant increase of 47.16 million tonnes over 2016-17, the total production of sugarcane is estimated at 353.23 million tonnes.
Cotton output at 33.92 million bales (of 170 kg each) is higher than the previous year’s production of 32.58 million bales.
Jute and Mesta output is estimated at 10.51 million bales (of 180 kg each) is lower than during 2016-17.
Male, Feb 28: Maldives State Health Minister Dunya Maumoon, niece of President Abdulla Yameen, resigned from the Cabinet after the arrest of her father and appealed the international community to support the Maldivian people in overcoming the political crisis plaguing the island nation.
Dunya’s father, former President of the Maldives Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, and brother Ahmed Faaris Maumoon
were arrested on charges of trying to topple the Yameen government.
Dunya has been under fire for working with the government while her father and brother are in police custody after a state of emergency was declared in the country.
She today resigned from the Cabinet, calling upon the international community to support the Maldivian people in overcoming the political crisis and to help build a stronger democratic system.
“I have refused to be bullied by different political forces and I remain strong and stand by my convictions,” she said in her resignation letter.
Her father, Gayoom, is Yameen s half-brother and ruled the country for 30 years until 2008. He was arrested at his residence early this month.
He is not just my father, but the father of the nation, who has built this country and has earned the respect and love of the people, she said in the letter.
Male, which has seen several political crises since the ouster of its first democratically-elected president Mohamed Nasheed in 2012, plunged into chaos early this month when the Supreme Court ordered the release of nine imprisoned Opposition politicians, maintaining that their trials were “politically motivated and flawed”.
Yameen has refused to obey the court orders and declared a state of emergency in the country.
New Delhi Feb 28: Opposition party members of Parliament’s joint committee on a proposed land acquisition Act today said the government was not serious about the bill as members from the ruling BJP were skipping the panel’s sessions.
The meeting of the Joint Committee on the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement (Second Amendment) Bill, 2015, was postponed due to lack of quorum, as only six out of the 31 members of the panel were present for discussions today.
“The moral of the story is that the bill is now dead. The government started this bill with a lot of fanfare but it is dead,” an Opposition member said.
TMC leader Derek O’Brien, who is also a member of the panel, said the meeting was called off and even ruling BJP MPs were missing.
They have lost the plot, O Brien tweeted, adding that the panel, chaired by a BJP MP, was woefully short of quorum .
Only six of the 31 members were present, he said. Even BJP members ditch,” he tweeted.
BJP MPs on the panel, however, said they were attending the meetings regularly, and asserted that the progress of its work to review the proposed legislation was satisfactory.
Opposition members claimed the panel had met only a few times.
The majority of the panel members are from the ruling BJP. Many of them claimed that barring a few misses, they were regular in attending the meetings.
MPs from several Opposition parties were skipping the meets, they claimed.
In May 2015, the bill was referred to the 30-member joint committee of Parliament after the government faced strong opposition from various political parties in the two Houses.
The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition Rehabilitation and Resettlement (second) Amendment Bill seeks to alter an Act brought by the previous Congress-led UPA government in 2013.
New Delhi, Feb 27: With the aim of helping the states affected by natural calamities, the government on Monday approved the monetary assistances of Rs 5,981.5 crore to nine states, which were badly hit last year.
Home Minister Rajnath Singh chaired the a meeting of the High Level Committee (HLC) here for Central Assistance to the States.
The HLC approved assistance of Rs 1711.66 crore in respect of state of Bihar, Rs 1055.05 crore for Gujarat, Rs 169.63 crore for Kerala, Rs 420.57 crore for Rajasthan and Rs 133.05 crore for Tamil Nadu.
For Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Chhattishgarh, the committee gave its approval of Rs 420.69 crore, Rs 838.85 crore and Rs 395.91 crore, respectively.
It also gave an assistance of Rs 836.09 crore to Madhya Pradesh.
Except Kerala, Chhatishgarh and Madhya Pradesh all states were badly affected by floods in 2017. The southern state was given grant in respect to Cyclone Ockhi.
Madhya Pradesh and Chhatishgarh were affected by Kharif drought.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba and senior officials from home, finance and agriculture ministries and NITI Aayog attended the meeting.
Hyderabad, Feb 27: Nearly three crore fake and duplicate ration cards have been cancelled during the three years of the NDA government, CR Chaudhary, Union Minister of State for Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution said today.
It had also saved the country Rs 17,000 crore every year during this time, he added.
Linking the ration card to the holder’s Aaadhaar number had allowed the government to clean up the system, the minister said.
He was speaking at the 21st National Conference on e-Governance here.
“Out of 23 crore ration cards in the country, 82 per cent (19 crore) are linked with Aadhaar. We have removed 2.95 crore fake or duplicate ration cards in the country in the past three years which has resulted in a saving of Rs 17,000 crore annually. It has ensured that food grains are being delivered to the rightful person,” he informed.
Chaudhary said that e-governance could help in increasing the ease of doing business in the country which, in turn, would help attract foreign investment.
Telangana’s Minister of IT and Industries, KT Rama Rao, who also addressed the conference, said that 4,500 “Me-Seva” centres in the state were handling 1.5 lakh transactions every day.
He informed that these centres had completed 10 crore transactions since they began seven years ago.
He added that an upgraded version of the project, covering 180 government services, would be launched soon.
He informed that 6,000 clearances had been given to industries under the state industrial policy called TS-iPass, and this involved an investment of Rs 1.2 lakh crore and had the potential to create three lakh jobs.
Beijing, Feb 26: In an unprecedented move, China’s ruling Communist Party today prepared the ground for President Xi Jinping to stay in power indefinitely after the end of his second term in 2022 as it proposed to remove presidential term limits from the party’s Constitution.
The CPC Central Committee proposed removing the clause that the President and Vice-President “shall serve no more than two consecutive terms” from the country’s Constitution, state-run Xinhua news agency reported today.
The removal of the term limit, which is expected to be endorsed by the Plenum of the party to be held tomorrow would give 64-year-old Xi, regarded as the most powerful leader in modern China, a limitless tenure.
Xi’s predecessors, Jiang Zemin who was in power from 1993 to 2003 and Hu Jintao from 2003 to 2013 stepped down as the General Secretary of the party as well as the president after widely followed rule as well as a convention of two terms to promote collective leadership system in the one-party state.
If China pushes ahead with the proposal, Xi would become the country’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, who ruled for more than three decades through 1976.
President Xi, who is also the general secretary of the CPC and chairman of the Central Military Commission, began his second five-year tenure last year, following a national Congress of the CPC.
A seven-man leadership committee unveiled last year included no potential successor, raising the prospect that Xi intends to govern beyond his second term.
Since then, all organs of the party have declared him as the topmost leader of the party setting aside the principle of collective party leadership that was followed in the last three decades.
The CPC Central Committee also today proposed writing Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era into the country’s Constitution.
This would make Xi the only leader after Mao and his predecessor Deng Xiaoping whose thoughts were written into the Constitution. It would place him above the rest of the leaders of the party.
Robert Lawrence Kuhn, an American scholar on China who moved closely with Chinese leaders and scholars for decades, told PTI earlier that the inclusion of Xi’s thoughts in the Constitution and his “core leadership” status conferred on him by the party previously put him “substantially ahead of others” in the party.
Besides the two-term rule, top Chinese leaders also followed a convention of retiring after 68 years.
With the status of “core leader” and his name written into the Constitution, the retirement age limit is not expected to be applicable to Xi. As per the existing convention, he is due to retire after 2022. Observers say as “core leader” Xi could continue as General Secretary of the CPC.
The new amendment to the Constitution removing the two term rule would clear the last impediment for him to continue as the president for an unprecedented third term after 2022.
Since Xi took over power he consolidated his hold on power with massive anti-graft campaign in which over a million officials from the top to bottom were punished.