Indian Current Affairs: 01.08.2008

Indians rush to invest abroad

But don’t be alarmed that we are losing confidence in our own country. According to the latest figures released by the RBI, outward remittances have touched a high of $440.5 mn in FY08 from a mere $9.6 mn in FY05. In the month of April alone an amount of $50 mn has been invested abroad. Look at the sectors the money is being invested abroad in this figure.
The annual limit for remittances by individuals was raised from $25,000 three years ago to $2,00,000 with leeway for investing in stocks, property and other assets.
In contrast, inward remittances are at over $30 billion. This is reckoned to be the highest in the world.

What a relief? Supreme Court directs Government to introduce a ‘do-call register’!!

The Supreme Court on Thursday asked the government to introduce a system of ‘do-call register’ within six weeks to curb the menace of unsolicited calls to mobile phone users.
It was prompted to do so, in view of the failure of the recently-introduced ‘do-not-call register’ which was aimed at checking unwanted calls, mostly by telemarketing operators.
The ‘do-call register’ will list the names of cellphone users who wish to receive calls related to marketing promotions. Telemarketing companies would be allowed to call only these users.
I welcome this activist move on the part of the Supreme Court. AFAIC telemarketers are pests who don’t have any tele-decency (tele-culture, whatever you call it) left in them. They don’t care whether we are in the midst of an important meeting or serious work or even answering some other call on the landline. Even when we prefer not to answer their call, it still keeps us disturbing from handling the ongoing landline call. The move by the Supreme Court would be a very great relief for me personally. I am sure many would second this.

IIT Madras

It celebrated its 50^th anniversary yesterday.

Indo US nuclear deal

Here is a very good graphic that discusses the impact of the deal on our nuclear technology. Take a look.
Whether or not we need nuclear power is a highly debated subject, by experts and novices alike. But, AFAWAC (as far as we are concerned) we are interested in both the arguments. Take a look at the pros and cons here.

Look at the various groupings in WTO talks

The G33 has 46 members
The African Group has 53 members
The African-Caribbean-Pacific Group, the small vulnerable economies, together have a membership of more than 100 countries

EPFO funds

Just a couple of days ago we noted that it had selected four AMCs to manage its net annual addition of about Rs. 30,000 crore to its corpus.
Its corpus at present is stated to be about Rs. 2.5 lakh crores.

Know of a country that banned cats and dogs as pets?

Saudi Arabia.
This is the one country that has an organisation called the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. Otherwise called the Muttawa or the Religious Police, it has just come out with en edict to promote the development of morality among the public. Pets, specifically, cats and dogs, can’t be bought anymore and neither can current owners take them for a walk from now on. The wisdom behind the edict is that men, apparently, were using the pets to make passes at women.
What a way to look at life!!

Have any ideas on tackling the terrorism menace?

Couldn’t resist excerpting the following points from an article from Shiv Visvanathan in today’s ET:
The West has little to offer us in terms of a pedagogy for terrorism. We need a global sense of the problem but may be with a sense of home-made recipes, humble but grounded. One needs a sense of grief and such that we behave as a community and no one feels alone or alien.
Second, we should not abandon the search for politics and political solutions. Militarising a society is lobotomising (meaning: reduce someone's level of mental functioning) civil society.
Thirdly, one must tap into the power of women’s groups, revive the Gandhian imagination, without piety, and also reconstruct the informal economy more innovatively. These NGOs of the mind are the sites where the defences of peace may be constructed.
Fourthly, we must realise our illiteracy about security. As a leading journalist put it, our leaders seems to think security is an equation involving VIP security, where most of our policeman are and the orchestration of fake encounters. The craft of intelligence demands anthropological encounters with people, movements and ethnicity. Till then any idea of people’s security is stillborn.
Finally, we must realise managerial and technical fixes are facilitating devices. They are not solutions. The solution is love and people who love, care and invent. To talk of terrorism as a continuation of the modern economy by other means is nihilism (meaning: A revolutionary doctrine that advocates destruction of the social system for its own sake). Terrorism demands we reinvent democracy as something more than an electoral majoritarian system. It is only a search for the new imagination grounded in everydayness that can spell the end of terrorism as a future way of life.

Look at GAP, not GAAP

India is set to have an agricultural testament called good agricultural practices (GAP) aimed at enhancing farm productivity marked by quality. India’s apex body to monitor export of processed foods and agricultural products — the Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority (APEDA) — has submitted a modified GAP document to the ministry of agriculture to adopt and implement.
It is a comprehensive guide on the farm sector to increase agricultural yields by accelerating the growth rate to over four percent during the current Plan period (2007-12) by telling farmers how to increase outputs, kind of technology and seeds they should use.
At present, India follows the stipulations of European Retailers Parties Good Agricultural Practices for the export of horticulture products such as grape, mango and pomegranate.

Saturn’s moon Titan: the only body in the solar system beyond Earth having liquid surface?

One of the large lakes observed on Saturn’s moon Titan contains liquid hydrocarbons, NASA scientists have said. They have also identified presence of ethane. Scientists made the discovery using data from an instrument aboard the Cassini spacecraft. Earlier, scientists had thought Titan would have oceans of methane, ethane and other light hydrocarbons.