Indian Current Affairs: 16.02.2007

Of the total petro-prodcuts sold in the country, how much does diesel account for?

45%
Major areas where it is used include goods transport by road, agriculture pumpsets and railways.

Customs duty on auto fuel is currently at 7.5%. And excide duty is about 8%.
At present the oil companies are losing about Rs. 2.35 per litre of diesel and 10 paise per litre of petrol sold.
Rangarajan committee has recommended for uniform customs duty rates on crude and petroleum products. If implemented, this would result in reduced protection for the domestic refining industry and improve the margins of the marketing companies.

It is the Rs. 175 crore Taj Heritage Corridor case.
Sanction is being sought under Section 197 of the CrPC. Section 197 of the CrPC requires sanction for any court to take cognizance of an offence allegedly committed by a public servant, not removable from office except with the sanction of the government, in the discharge of his or her official duty.
CBI investigations have revealed that the former CM had accorded her approval to the Taj project and had also ordered release of funds without required approvals.

In 2004, Madrid, Spain had witnessed a spate of terror attacks that killed 191 people and wounded more than 1800.
29 suspects are being brought to trial there in Spain.
Of the 12 suspected ring leaders, only three were brought before the court; seven others blew themselves up to avoid arrest and the rest are fugitives.
These suspects were all inspired by Al-Qaeda; though it appears they are not directly related to that banned group.

About $5,600 is the cost of operational expenditure per cell tower per annum.
Of the world’s total cow population of 150 crore (1.5 bn), India is home to about 20 crores (200 mn) cows.
About 63% of rural families do not have access to electricity. With a shortfall of 15,000 to 20,000 mw of electricity in the country, most rural areas experience 10-15 hours of load shedding each day.

A new site near Rohtak near Haryana was discovered. The exact location is on a link road from Julana to Kirsola village, about 35 km from Rohtak.

The structure of a protein on the surface of HIV as it looks while the protein is bound to an infection-fighting antibody is revealed by atomic-level images of the virus made by scientists of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, US. A protein called gp120, seems susceptible to attack by this antibody, which is called b12 and is capable of broadly neutralizing the virus.

Mahatma Gandhi Backward Region Development Fund will be launched by the PM shortly, to redress the regional imbalances in development. With a corpus of Rs. 3,750 crore it will provide financial resources to supplement and converge existing developmental inflows into 250 identified districts across the country.

It is defined as disguising the source or ownership of illegally gained money to make it appear legitimate or hiding money to avoid paying taxes or using legally gained money in pursuit of unlawful activities.
It usually takes place in three phases.

Placement: Depositing bulk cash into the banking system using currency or funds from illegal activities
Layering: Multiple transactions are used to separate the proceeds from their illegal source.
Integration: The illegal funds are mixed with apparently legitimate business earnings.

Gem and Jewellery India International Exhibition is being held in Chennai from March 2
Administered Pricing Mechanism in petro products has led to some bad consequences. They are:

Price signals are suppressed, leading to suboptimal resource allocation.
Oil marketing companies are forced to sell below cost, denting their bottom line for which they are then compensated by issue of oil bonds. Since these oil bonds are in reality off-budget way of financing the losses of oil companies, the net effect if to pass on a burden that should, rightly be borne by the oil consumers, to the economy as a whole.

“What they don’t teach you at Harvard Business School” is a book by Mark McCormack
The current monetary tightening (which can be said to have begun in September 2004) appears for some to be not yielding the desired results. Here is how:

For a long time, banks were basically funding their asset expansion by running down their excess holdings of government securities. These holdings peaked at 42% of net demand and time liabilities, far above the statutory liquidity ratio of 25%, owning mainly to limited demand for credit at that time. Thus, banks had substantial leeway to cut their government bond holdings, and this reliance on internal non-deposit funding limited the effective transmission of monetary tightening, as banks did not have to compete intensely for deposits.
Also, money markets remained flush despite the gradual monetary tightening, limiting the impact of gradual hikes in policy rates on bank lending rates.
Additionally, the government continued to ease restrictions on foreign borrowing by Indian companies. Some of this borrowing was used for foreign acquisitions, but a substantial portion was used domestically. This, along with the pressure on state-owned banks not to raise lending rates, only compromised the effectiveness of the transmission of tighter monetary policy.

While we are getting really worried about inflation hovering at above 6.5%, do you know the rate of inflation in US?
It is about 2% to 2.25%. They expect inflation to be about 1.75% to 2% in 2008.

We go gaga over our FDI and FII figures day in and day out. But do you know that in 2006 (full year), the US attracted a net of $89,610 crores ($896.1 bn) of foreign investments. Their net foreign investments are much larger than our total GDP!!!

Indian Current Affairs