The Canadian Parvasi- issue 56

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The International News Weekly EDIT 04 August 03, 2018 | Toronto The w w w . canadianparv asi. c o m Publisher & CEO Associate Editor Editor (India) Online Graphic Designer Official Photographer Contact Editorial Sales Rajinder Saini Meenakshi Saini Gursheesh Kshitiz Dalal Naveen Bashir Nasir editor@canadianparvasi.com sales@canadianparvasi.com RC Football Assam exercise is becoming a focal Lok Sabha poll issue in unfortunate ways With the National Register of Citizens draft list leaving out 40 lakh applicants, a big political row has erupted in the country. While BJP has defended the NRC exercise with party president Amit Shah calling it the soul of the 1985 Assam Accord to identify illegal migrants, Congress has criticised the process saying that genuine citizens have been left out. Meanwhile, Trinamool Congress head and Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee has alleged that the exercise has been carried out to divide people. Political parties are formulating their respective positions on NRC with an eye on the next Lok Sabha elections. The Assam-specific exercise is perfect for more widespread dogwhistle signalling. For example, BJP clearly plans to politically cash in on the issue by projecting itself as the party that finally took decisive action against illegal Bangladeshi infiltrators. The subtext here is that Muslim migrants from neighbouring countries have no place in India. This was underlined by Amit Shah himself as he reiterated that changes were being made to the Citizenship Act for Hindu and Sikh refugees. Congress, while critical of NRC, finds it hard to dissociate itself from the Assam Accord that Rajiv Gandhi had signed. Hence the party’s recourse to technical flaws of the exercise in the hope of appealing to both for and against NRC constituencies. And Trinamool’s forceful rejection of NRC positions it as a party for the aggrieved – particularly Bengali speaking Muslims in Assam and Bengal. Adding to the politicking is the fact that the final NRC list is expected by the end of the year – close to the tentative Lok Sabha poll schedule. Notably, none of the parties have spoken about solutions for those who will be left out of the final NRC. If Trinamool genuinely cared, why is Bengal among the worst defaulters in NRC verification, returning only 6% of the documents sent to it for authentication? Similarly, the Supreme Court which is overseeing the exercise – and has said no coercive action should be taken based on the draft list – should have been more proactive in preventing anomalies. Taken together, the NRC has become a convenient political tool. Bengal BJP has now proposed an NRC for that state should it come to power there. Such proposals have no legal basis and only aim to whip up hysteria. The people, as usual, remain the political football. TNN Draft That’s Daft An ecommerce policy that won’t produce local champions & will discourage foreign investors Saubhik.Chakrabarti@timesgroup.com On business matters, governments think wrong and do wrong frequently. They think right and do right a few times. And sometimes they think right but do horribly wrong, like in the draft ecommerce policy. GoI wants locallyowned, locallymanaged ecommerce success stories. That’s right thinking. But the draft policy goes about this spectacularly wrongly. If this is the final policy, India won’t get what it should, and will lose what it has. What India’s ecommerce market has is plenty of foreign investment. What it should have, while keeping foreign investors interested, are locally owned and managed competitors to firms backed by outside capital. Given this, the draft is really smart on only one count – the suggestion that startups can issue shares with differential voting rights. The aim is to provide Indian founders of successful online ventures more control over companies they have built even if foreign investors have put in most of the capital. So, a share owned by a founder will carry more weight than, say, a share owned by a Chinese venture capital firm. Shareholding structures that restrict voting rights of foreign investors are not unusual. Some hugely successful startups in the US and China, the world’s two largest internet economies, have shareholding rules that allow founders with minority stock to call the shots. Will large investors lose interest if they can’t be the boss of a company they put money in? Not at all. As is the case in China and the US, India can attract large investors in ecommerce under rules that favour more control for local entrepreneurs, provided the returns on investment are potentially high. So, that was good thinking. Now for the really bad bits of the draft policy – socialism-type restrictions on pricing strategies, a completely needless additional layer of regulation, silly dos and don’ts on what can be sold and how, etc, etc. Space for this column is limited, and silly suggestions abound in the draft. So, we will pick just a few examples to demonstrate our argument. Take the recommendation that deep discounting – selling goods really, really cheap – must be thoroughly discouraged. This seems aimed principally at pricing strategies of Amazon India and Walmartowned Flipkart – two American giants. Of course, Amazon India and foreigninvestor controlled Flipkart use capital available from abroad to sell stuff really cheap. And of course, that’s one of the big reasons they control nearly threefourths of India’s online market. But even locally-backed and locallymanaged online shops would want to do the same thing. Deep discounting is a universal ecommerce strategy. It’s employed to win customer loyalty, more so in markets where online commerce is still a small part of overall retail. India’s online retail is just 3% of total retail sales. Therefore, a policy that targets discounting will actually harm future local entrepreneurs. People who made this recommendation forgot basic economics, which is that government intervention in pricing, especially in consumer market pricing, always ends up disastrously. Local startups won’t flourish if they as well as Amazon and Flipkart can’t sell products cheap. A smarter way to level the playing field against deep-pocketed foreign investors who can afford deep discounting is to have a policy that allows firms to offer steep price cuts only when all or most of their capital is locally sourced. This will truly discourage capital dumping from abroad, without ridiculous interference in firms’ pricing strategies. But won’t that be unfair to an Amazon or a Walmart? No. They are free to offer deep discounts but the capital deployed in Amazon India or Flipkart must be raised locally. They will compete with local firms for capital, and they may actually attract more investor interest. But that’s wholly fair. Amazon or Walmart won’t like it. But they will have to balance their loss of the capital dumping option against giving up on one of the world’s most exciting online marketplaces. That’s smart policymaking. Terribly unsmart, too, is the draft policy’s idea of a new regulator for ecommerce. Governments love new regulators by instinct, and also because bureaucrats who make policy know every new regulator means a bunch of nice jobs for retired administrators. Why do you need a new ecommerce regulator? All transactions in an ecommerce play are covered by existing laws. If there’s a contractual violation by any party in the buy-sell chain, there are consumer courts and courts. If there are disputes over, say, shareholding patterns in a listed startup, there’s Sebi, the stock market regulator. If there are questions over data storage, there’s a new law on data protection coming up. Indeed, that the policy suggested data storage norms different from those suggested just days before by the Srikrishna committee seems to suggest those writing the draft were in some other world. In this world, an ecommerce policy for India shouldn’t be a nanny state in dotcom disguise. Indian startups need a few regulations, like those against capital dumping, and a committed government push to creating an environment rich in capitalraising possibilities. It’s the lack of local capital that’s holding back creation of local champions. But guess what? The draft policy has almost nothing to say on this. The draft, that’s why, is pretty daft. Source Credit: This article was first published in The Times of India. 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The International News Weekly World 05 August 03, 2018 | Toronto India all set to get waiver relief from US sanctions against Russia Indo-Asian News Service WASHINGTON : The US Senate has passed a bill that gives India a partial waiver relief from sanctions against Russian firms and oligarchs, allowing it to keep buying Russia-made weapons in a landmark decision that is seen as a big diplomatic win for New Delhi. The defence spending bill, which now goes to President Donald Trump before it becomes a law, also seeks to "strengthen and enhance" defence partnership with India. It was passed by the House last week. The National Defence Authorization Act was passed on Wednesday with overwhelmingly bipartisan support - a vote of 87-10 in the Senate and 359-54 in the House. The bill authorizes a $717 billion US defence budget to rebuild its military and "strengthens our alliances and partnerships and reforms the way we do business", Secretary of Defence James Mattis said in a statement. He said the bill "provides waiver relief to key US partners and allies from certain Russian-related sanctions under the Countering America's Adversaries through Sanctions Act" (CAATSA). The CAATSA amendment allows countries like India to continue buying military equipment from Russia provided they fulfill certain conditions, like reducing defence purchases from Russia. The law, which came into effect in 2018, sanctions some Russia firms, including staterun military hardware makers, and some businessmen, for alleged meddling in the 2016 US Presidential elections. Indian-Australian, 3 others win ‘Nobel of maths’ NYT & AGENCIES New York : Every four years, at an international gathering of mathematicians, the subject’s youngest and brightest are honoured with the Fields Medal, often described as the Nobel Prize of mathematics. This year’s recipients, announced on Wednesday at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Rio de Janeiro, include renowned Indian-Australian mathematician Akshay Venkatesh. New Delhi-born Venkatesh, 36, who is currently teaching at Stanford University, has won the Fields Medal for his “profound contributions to an exceptionally broad range of subjects in mathematics” and his “strikingly far-reaching conjectures”. From being a child prodigy to becoming one of the most renowned researchers in the field of mathematics, Venkatesh’s journey has been full of achievements and accolades. Having moved to Perth with his parents when he was 2, he participated in physics and math Olympiads — the premier international competitions for high school students — and won medals in the two subjects at ages 11 and 12, respectively. He finished high school when he was 13 and went to the University of Western Australia, graduating with first class honours in mathematics in 1997, at the age of 16. In 2002, he earned his PhD at the age of 20. Since then, he has gone from holding a postdoctoral position at MIT to becoming a Clay Research Fellow and, now a professor at Stanford University. Venkatesh has worked at the highest level in number theory, arithmetic geometry, topology, automorphic forms and ergodic theory. His research has been recognised with many awards, including the Ostrowski Prize, the Infosys Prize, the Salem Prize and Sastra Ramanujan Prize. Recently, Venkatesh and one of his former graduate students found a different way to prove a groundbreaking theorem from the 1980s that stated that one could tell whether a set of equations had a finite number of solutions or infinitely many just by looking at the form of the equations. Although the result is not new, their novel approach could lead to further progress in understanding the solvability of equations. “He truly is a universal mathematician,” said Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin, who has worked on problems with Venkatesh. “His work has gone in a lot of different directions.” The other Fields medalists this year are Peter Scholze, 30, of the University of Bonn; Caucher Birkar, 40, of the University of Cambridge in England; and Alessio Figalli, 34, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. At 30, Scholze is one of the youngest ever recipients of the award. The youngest winner, Jean-Pierre Serre in 1954, was 27. By custom, Fields medals are bestowed to mathematicians 40 years old or younger. Scholze gained prominence when he was still in graduate school in 2010, simplifying a complicated booklength, 288-page proof to a novella-size 37-page version. In his mathematics, he works with fractal structures that he calls perfectoid spaces. Kurdish refugee turned Cambridge University professor Birkar’s field is algebraic geometry, which investigates connections between numbers and shapes. The medal, first awarded in 1936, was conceived by John Charles Fields, a Canadian mathematician. Each winner receives a 15,000 Canadian-dollar cash prize. The act also forbade thirdparty countries from doing "significant transactions" with Russia in military and intelligence sectors through the threat of secondary sanctions. Now the modified version of the act requires presidential certifications allowing key US allies to trade with Russia. "I am grateful for the strong commitment of members on both sides of the aisle to pass this year's NDAA in record time. Together, they have demonstrated the deep and abiding bipartisan support our military enjoys," Mattis said. "It is now our duty to implement these policies responsibly and ensure a culture of performance and accountability." Among the first in the line of fire of anti-Russia sanctions was India, which is all set to buy five Russianmade S-400 Triumf advanced air defence systems. An agreement for the deal is expected to be signed when Prime Minister Narendra afpxy pirvfr dIaF KLusLIaF surwiKaq kro Modi visits Moscow later this year. Significantly, the bill also proposes to "strengthen and enhance" America's major defence partnership with India and "work toward mutual security objectives". It talks about the strategic Quadrilateral Dialogue between the US, India, Japan, and Australia for "expanding engagement in multilateral frameworks". Also known as the Quad, the grouping first established in 2007-08, was revived last year amid China's assertive maritime strategy expansion, land reclamation and territorial claims in and around the South China Sea. Thieves flee in speedboat with Swedish crown jewels AGENCIES Stockholm: Two men walked into a small Swedish town’s medieval cathedral on Tuesday and stole “priceless” crown jewels dating back to the early 1600s before escaping by speedboat, police said on Wednesday. The two vanished after the noon heist into a vast patchwork of lakes around Strangnas, 60 km from Stockholm. They snatched two gold crowns and an orb made for King Karl IX and Queen Christina in the daring robbery. The king’s crown is made of gold and features crystals and pearls, while Christina’s is smaller and made of gold, precious stones and pearls. The stolen items were on display at an exhibition in the cathedral. Visitors were inside at the time when the alarm went off as the burglars smashed the security glass and stole the artefacts. However, no one was hurt in the robbery. Police said the thieves could have fled further on jet skis. While the items are of great historic value, police expressed doubt whether ieMsLorYNs ibjLns Puwl tfeIm jF pfrt tfeIm sLurU krnf cfhuMcy ho sfzy nfl jLrUr sMprk kro SUPER VISA INSURANCE Life Insurance Retirement Planning, Disability Insurance, Estate Planning, Critical Illness Insurance Group plans Travel Insurance RESP, RRSP, TFSA shI slfh, quhfzy aqy quhfzy pirvfr leI lfhyvMd sfbq ho skdI hY Ph:- 416-318-5400 Baljinder Sekha 203-7035 Maxwell Road, Mississauga, ON. the burglary would bring the perpetrators financial gain. The items are a “national treasure” and hence “impossible to sell” because of their uniqueness and high visibility, Maria Ellior of the Swedish police’s National Operations Department said. The theft would be logged at Interpol, enabling an international search. Gursimrat Grewal Email:- info@familyprotectiongroup.ca www.familyprotectiongroup.ca
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