15.08.2007

• My dear friends,

Happy Independence Day celebrations to you all. I was busy participating in the celebrations myself in Hyderabad. Hence there is delay in posting to our blog. I created a web greeting card for all of you and posted it to the group.

Celebrate and enjoy the Independence Day with a reading of the enormous content given in ET at India Empowered – Young at 60.

• Today’s ET has so much to read and write from. But I found that some thoughts expressed by beloved our PM need excerpting in our blog. So I put an excerpt in our Discover It blog. Take a look at it here.
• A little about Indian shipping industry
• The industry is expected to make an investment of about $4 bn over the next few years in fleet expansion.
• In India the average age of a vessel is over 15 years, as against 12 years internationally.
• Cess on coal mining
• Coal mining is done basically in two forms: open cast mining and underground mining.
• Of the total production of about 360 mn tonnes of coal annually by Coal India Limited, the contribution from underground mines is a mere 46 mn tonnes.
• While open cast mining is easy, the underground mining has the potential to generate larger production, as compared with opencast mines.
• So, with a view to further develop the country’s capacity in underground mining, the government is thinking of imposing a cess on open cast mining. It may be around 3 to 5% of the price of coal.
• India and the Egmont Group
• Do you remember, we have noted something about this group sometime back in our blog?
• As India has now built a database of cash withdrawals and deposits of above Rs. 10 lakhs, it is seriously researching them to find out money laundering operations. The FIU (Financial Intelligence Unit) established in the Finance Ministry is on the job.
• The FIU shares the information with the Egmont group and other such bodies globally to tighten the monitoring mechanism in the financial sector.
• This is all being done as part of the efforts to scuttle the finance channels to terrorism.
• We are being fed on the theme of 150 years of independence struggle et al. Right?
• Take a view at what SSSA Aiyar says on this. It is a good read. And I support him in his views, fully.
• One possible essay question to which his article can be a good answer can be like this:
• Was the threat of himsa at least as big a factor in winning independence as Gandhiji’s ahimsa?