Indian Economy-News & Updates

[Abhishek_]

Gujarat's first solar rooftop project generates 1.2 million units in six months

The state's first roof-top solar energy project in Gandhinagar that started operating this year has so far generated a total of 1.2 million units of solar power.

In the first six months of operations, nearly 260 small residential households participated in the first phase of the project in Gandhinagar with a total generation potential of one megawatt,stated an official release from Gujarat Power Corporation Limited (GPCL) which is in-charge of developing and implementing the rooftop solar concept in Gujarat.

To facilitate this partnership, Gujarat Power Corporation has opened a facilitation centre at Gandhinagar where households willing to offer their roof can enroll for an initial assessment of the technical suitability of the rooftops. Till date over 760 KW of residential leases have been signed by the developers with 260 residents in Gandhinagar. The rooftop owners get at least Rs. 3 per unit of energy generated as a rooftop rental. So far, about 3.2 MW of solar rooftopsystems have already been installed in the state's capital.

"The total installation capacity under the Gandhinagar project is five megawatts. Out of this, four megawatts will be installed on government buildings and a total of one megawatt will be installed on private residential homes. We are now taking this successful program to Surat, Rajkot, Bhavnagar, Mehsana and Vadodara in the second phase where we plan to generate 25 megawatt of energy", says Gujarat minister for Energy, Saurabh Patel.

80 per cent of the capacity for the Gandhinagar Project will be made available from government buildings while the balance 20 per cent of the capacity will be installed on residential premises.

Selected after a competitive bidding process, two experienced companies -Azure Power and Avantha Sun Edison are developing the project inGandhinagar.

The two companies are now installing and maintaining solar photovoltaic systems on rooftops of homes and government buildings. The solar photovoltaic systems convert direct sunlight into electricity which is fed into the electrical grid.Under this model, the solar power generated by rooftops is sold by Azure and Sun Edison at a competitively determined tariff to Torrent Power - a private distribution company that operates the electricity grid in the capital city.

Gujarat's first solar rooftop project generates 1.2 million units in six months - Indian Express

 

[IndoCarib]

BBC News - Tesco to open multi-brand stores in India

Tesco has applied to open multi-brand stores in India, the UK retailer and Indian officials have said.
The company has applied to India's Foreign Investment Promotion Board and plans to invest $110m (£68m).

 

[IndoCarib]

Carrefour enters South India | Business Standard

France’s Carrefour group, the world’s largest retailer after Walmart, opened its first store in the south here on Wednesday, challenging Metro in the cash-and-carry business in India. Its German rival runs three cash-and-carry stores in the city

Hitachi aims to make India base for construction equipment business - Economic Times

Japan's engineering and electronics major Hitachi would expand its construction machinery and power electronics products business in Africa, Middle East and South East Asia by making India a base for these segments.
The group, which plans to invest 70 billion Yen (Rs 4,700 crore) by the financial year 2015-16, would bolster the businesses supported by production for consumption in India by increasing localisation component, said Hitachi Executive Vice President and Executive Officer Junzo Nakajima.

 

[Abingdonboy]

This is very shocking I knew India would be ahead but not by such a huge margin. Even accounting for the population differentials it has to be said the rest of S.Asia is not performing terribly well.

 

[luckych]

Druva: Startup by IITians sells data security software to NASA, Pfizer and Louis Vuitton

On a student exchange programme in Germany over a decade ago, Jaspreet Singh ran a popular Indian cuisine venture from his hostel room. The business did not last but it provided the IITGuwahati graduate with valuable lesons in starting up.

"It was fun to do something on my own," says Singh, who five years later would team up with two senior colleagues at global software company Veritas, to launch Druva, which helps companies protect data across multiple devices.

Working out of ..

Read more at:
Druva: Startup by IITians sells data security software to NASA, Pfizer and Louis Vuitton - Economic Times

 

[cloud_9]

 

[telugodu]

GURGAON, India (Reuters) - Three months since journeying more than 700 milesfrom his village in central India to take a job in this bustling city near the capital, New Delhi, Charan is already looking forward to a 10 percent pay rise. He isn't an engineer or programmer. He hauls bricks and sand at a local construction site for less than $100 a month.

India's biggest cities face a worsening shortage of migrant manual laborers like 26-year-old Charan, who goes by only one name. While India has long suffered from a dearth of workers with vocational skills like plumbers and electricians, efforts to alleviate poverty in poor, rural areas have helped stifle what was once a flood of cheap, unskilled labor from India's poorest states.

Struggling to cope with soaring food prices, this dwindling supply of migrant workers are demanding - and increasingly getting - rapid increases in pay and benefits.

"After paying for food we are left with almost nothing. We need a wage hike," said Charan, who sends a part of whatever he and his wife, who works at the same site, manage to save to their parents back home in Chhattisgarh state.

If their employer refuses to give them an adequate raise, they are confident they'll find better-paying jobs at one of the hundreds of other sites dotted around Gurgaon.

Such gains by migrants and the rural poor don't come without a cost to the rest of the country.

More than pressuring corporate profits, these rapid blue-collar wage increases threaten efforts to quell inflation by India's new central bank chief, Raghuram Rajan, the former International Monetary Fund economist who took over as governor at the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in September. Rajan has made price stability a policy priority, calling it a prerequisite for reviving economic growth that has slipped to 5 percent a year, the lowest in a decade.

Despite little evidence that interest rates can control food prices, Rajan has raised rates twice since taking over to prevent food-price inflation from spilling over into the wider economy. He has warned of another hike next month if prices don't cool significantly.

"India has become a high-cost economy," said Devendra Kumar Pant, chief economist at India Ratings & Research. "Persistently high inflation is a recipe for disaster."

Take onions, which figure in almost every Indian meal. Prices for onions shot up 190 percent to $1.60 a kilogram in the past year, making them more expensive in India than in the United States, where incomes are roughly 35 times higher. That helped push vegetable prices up 95 percent in the past year and pushed India's headline inflation rate in November to 7.5 percent, a 14-month high.

And while vegetable prices are expected to start easing next month following a bumper harvest, subsidized government purchases of grains and rising farming costs mean overall food inflation is not likely to slow down much.



Read more: Food And Wage Inflation In India - Business Insider

 

[telugodu]

James Astill's exploration of India's grand obsession took him into the highest offices of cricket and commerce - often one and the same - as well as onto the maidans and into the teeming backstreets. In a bookshop, he met Bengali sociologist and author Ashis Nandy, who once wrote that cricket is ''an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English''.

Astill expands: ''He argues that Indians prefer slow-burning dramas and endless digression, that they have an equivocal view of destiny, in which victory and defeat are always partial.'' At the end of their conversation, Nandy says to Astill: ''I don't see much of cricket in this IPL business.''

But there is much of India in this IPL business, a modern and transformed India, a nouveau riche India, a titillated India. In this IPL business, at some grounds, the incoming batsman's salary is flashed up on the scoreboard as well as his batting average. Astill vividly describes his first experience of the IPL, a psychedelic event in Delhi. ''It was a rubbish game of cricket,'' he writes. ''But for millions of Indian viewers, this was the cricket of their dreams. It was the purest tamasha.'' Tamasha is a Hindi word for entertainment, and the title of Astill's book.

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Astill was for three years south Asia bureau chief for The Economist. The Great Tamasha is as much the accomplishment of a personal as professional end. He threw himself so wholly into the project that one day in Rawalpindi, he faced up in the nets to the fearfully fast, but this day merciful Shoaib Akhtar. Astill demonstrates how the development of Indian cricket parallels its political and economic evolution, making the IPL as inevitable as it is trashy.

Indian cricket always has been a game cherished by the masses, but played by elites and run by charming, rogue-ish demi-royals - maharajahs then, tycoons now.

Caste, religion, politicking, nepotism and corruption all have played their part, sometimes to a comical degree. Astill tells of Indian board vice-president Niranjan Shah, who has run cricket in Saurashtra for 40 years, and whose son is captain of that state, despite averaging 28. He has had contracts with three IPL teams, but never appeared.

For touching contrast, Astill spends a day with the humble Arvind Pujara, who for two decades has dipped into his own pocket to coach boys in two tattered nets in a stadium owned by the Indian railways in Rajkot. One was his son, Cheteshawar, who began at four, and at 21 played a match-winning innings on Test debut against Australia in Bangalore, and was received with garlands and rose petals upon his return to Rajkot that night, and at 7am the next day was back in the nets with his father.

Television prefigured revolution. When Sachin Tendulkar began, there were 30 million TV households in India. Now, after the pageant of his retirement, there are close to 200 million. Here, Rupert Murdoch's sport-as-battering-ram philosophy has had its fullest flowering. Televised cricket swamps all other entertainment, even Bollywood, with which it shares an entranced nexus. ''Whenever movies and cricket compete in our country, cricket wins,'' the head of a major film production company tells Astill.

The sums associated with the IPL are astronomical, and a matter of pride. ''India, for so long poor and embarrassed, (is) at last emerging as a global power - and the IPL seemed to many Indians like a powerful symbol of that,'' writes Astill. In their euphoria, few are mindful of collateral damage. One is that the national team has lost its edge. ''India's unique and multitudinous passion for cricket, (fully) harnessed, would unleash a torrent of sporting talent unprecedented in history in any game,'' Astill says. ''But it will not happen, because the good of Indian cricket is not the chief priority of the politicians who run the BCCI.''

Nor is the good of world cricket. The inevitable expansion of the IPL is suffocating the increasingly fragile international game. ''For cricket tragics, it is a depressing outlook,'' Astill writes. ''India, a country that has so enriched cricket, is now the gravest threat to its most precious traditions.'' Unapologetically. '''Like in baseball,'' the tyrannical Niranjan Shah tells Astill, ''America is not worried whether other country is playing or not.''



Read more: India Inc: the bat, ball and billionaires

 

[telugodu]

SINGAPORE/MUMBAI—Indian gold smugglers are adopting the methods of drug couriers to sidestep a government crackdown on imports of the precious metal, stashing gold in imported vehicles and even using mules who swallow nuggets to try to get them past airport security.

Stung by rules imposed this year to cut a high trade deficit and a record duty on imports, dealers and individual customers are fanning out across Asia to buy gold and sneak it back into the country.

Sri Lanka, Thailand and Singapore are the latest hotspots as authorities crack down on travellers from Dubai, the traditional source of smuggled gold.

In a sign of the times, whistleblowers who help bust illegal gold shipments can get a bigger reward in India than those who help catch cocaine and heroin smugglers.

“Gold and narcotics operate as two different syndicates but gold smuggling has become more profitable and fashionable,” said Kiran Kumar Karlapu, an official at Mumbai’s Air Intelligence Unit.

“There has been a several-fold increase in gold smuggling this year after restrictions from the government, which has left narcotics behind.”

From travellers laden head-to-toe in jewellery to passengers who conceal carbon-wrapped gold pieces in their bodies—in the mistaken belief that metal detectors will not be set off—Indians are smuggling in more bullion than ever, government officials say, driven by the country’s insatiable demand for the metal.

That suggests official data showing a sharp fall in gold buying, which has helped narrow India’s current account gap, may significantly underestimate the real level of gold flows.

The World Gold Council estimates that 150 to 200 tonnes of smuggled gold will enter India in 2013, on top of the 900 tonnes of official demand.

Between April to September alone, India’s customs officials seized nearly double the amount of smuggled gold it nabbed in all of 2012.

“Though the quantum of seizures has increased, in our opinion it reflects only 1 to 2 per cent of total smuggling,” said a revenue intelligence officer in Mumbai who declined to be named. “Dubai is still the number one place from where gold gets in and Singapore is slowly emerging. Sri Lanka has become a staging point.”

Grappling with a high trade deficit and weak currency, India imposed measures this year to crimp demand for gold, the second most expensive item on its import bill after oil. It imposed a 10-per cent duty on bullion and a 15-per cent tariff on jewellery. Imports plunged to 24 tonnes in October from a record 162 tonnes in May.

Gold is an integral part of Indian culture, offered at weddings and festivals. India was the world’s biggest gold consumer until last year but will be overtaken by China in 2013.

India has now stepped up co-operation with nearby countries to stem the smuggling.

In late November, Sri Lanka limited the amount of jewellery its residents can take out of the country and it will try to monitor whether they bring it back. Pakistan banned all gold imports in August for a month as it believed much was being smuggled on into India.

Indian gold premiums have soared to $130 (U.S.) an ounce over London prices due to the supply crunch, compared with about $2 an ounce in Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand.

Banks and other official trading agencies in Singapore and Thailand that had supplied gold to their Indian counterparts have stopped due to India’s new rules.

But smaller dealers and retailers say they have been selling more to Indian customers than ever before, in jewellery and other forms.

Brian Lan, managing director of Singapore-based dealer GoldSilver Central Pte Ltd, said he has sold about 10 kg (22 lbs) of gold to a single Indian customer and gets multiple similarly big orders on some days.

“We have Indian dealers buying from us directly on a regular basis,” said a second Singapore dealer. “They say they have their own means of taking it in without getting caught.”

As customs officials at airports and borders get more vigilant, smugglers are innovating.

In June, a passenger flying from Dubai was caught at New Delhi airport with about 755 grams (1.7 lbs) of solid gold staples painted grey. Officials stopped the man because the cardboard boxes he was carrying were stapled far more than seemed necessary.

In several other cases, travellers have been caught with gold in their underwear. Flight attendants and police officers have been arrested for aiding the smugglers.

“We are trying to plug all the loopholes. We have strengthened our anti-smuggling staff and installed door metal detectors,” said S.A.S. Navaz, deputy commissioner of customs in the south Indian city of Kochi. “We are spending sleepless nights.

“Most of the time, it is done with the support of (airport) staff. It is very difficult to keep an eye on everyone.”

In late November, 56 Sri Lankans were held in Kochi after they were found with nearly 12 kg of gold. Some of them had travelled to Kochi six times last month.

Sri Lanka, which raised taxes on gold imports from June to November due to rising smuggling to India, last week said female residents could only fly out with 120 grams of jewellery, the equivalent of about 28 wedding bands. Men are allowed a third of that.

Customs officials may allow exceptions but will monitor if passengers bring back the same amount of gold they left with.

“In the last three to four months, we have seen several cases of gold smuggling from Sri Lanka to India through cities such as Mumbai, Kochi and Chennai,” Leslie Gamini, a spokesman for Sri Lankan customs, said from Colombo.

“It is a very difficult task. But we have to implement it. We are in the process of developing guidelines on how to implement this.”

Though the number of arrests made in India has increased, those that get caught are usually only the “carriers” who transport gold for as little as 10,000 Indian rupees ($160 U.S.). The people behind the smuggling are rarely identified.

 

[luckych]

High-level panel approves Rs 17,630 crore port projects
The government today said a high-level committee has examined Rs 17,630 crore projects in the port sector, which are proposed to be awarded this fiscal under the public private partnership (PPP) mode.

"The Public Private Partnership Appraisal Committee has appraised five proposals in the Port Sector. These projects will now be recommended for grant of final approval by theCabinet Committee on Economic Affairs. The proposed projects are to create an additional capacity of 150 MTPA with an investment of Rs 17,630 crore," an official statement said.

The statement said Shipping Ministry will submit a note to the Cabinet for final nod to projects.

These include developments of the fourth Container Terminal at Jawaharlal Nehru Port, Container Terminal atEnnore Port, multipurpose Cargo at Mumbai Port, Mega Container Terminal at Kandla Port and Container Terminal at Diamond Harbour at Kolkata Port.

"These projects are proposed to be awarded in the current financial year by various Major Ports for implementation under Public Private Partnership (PPP) mode. The proposed projects are to create an additional capacity of 150 million tonne per annum with an investment of about Rs 17,630 crore," it said.

This year, the Ministry of Shipping has so far conveyed approval for 16 projects against a target of 30 and the Major Ports have already awarded these projects.

These already awarded projects include six under PPP and 10 under non-PPP mode and they are expected to add a capacity of 89 MMTPA with an investment of about Rs 4,200 crore.

The capacity of the major ports stood at 747.51 MT at the end of the last fiscal.

India at present has 12 major ports - Kolkata-Halida, Paradip, Visakhapatnam, Ennore, Chennai, V O Chidambaranar (formerly Tuticorin), Cochin, New Mangalore, Mormugao, Mumbai, Jawaharlal Nehru and Kandla.

High-level panel approves Rs 17,630 crore port projects - Economic Times

 

[IndoCarib]

Standard Digital News : : Business - India pips China to take top trading spot with Kenya

India remained the market of choice for Kenya for the better part of this year with imports from the Asian country reaching Sh208.6 billion in the first ten months.

Data from the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) shows that India is the largest source of goods to Kenya, accounting for about 20 per cent of the imports.

 

[Abhishek_]

ONGC’s first power plant starts commercial generation

The Palatana power project, expected to ease the power problem of seven of the eight northeastern states, is the biggest gas-based thermal power project in the region

Agartala: State-owned ONGC's first commercial power project in the country started commercial production Tuesday night in Tripura, six months after President Pranab Mukherjee dedicated the 726 MW capacity facility to the nation.

"After the inauguration of the power project June 21 by the president, technical hurdles were found in the 53-km gas ONGC (Oil and Natural Gas Corporation) pipelines. All types of technical hitches were resolved by engineers, and the generation from the first unit (363.3 MW capacity) of the power plant began Tuesday night," ONGC Tripura Power Company (OTPC) managing director Sudhindra Kumar Dube said.

"The second unit (363.3 MW capacity) of the gas-based power project is expected to start by June," Dube told reporters.

OTPC is a special purpose vehicle (SPV) promoted by ONGC, Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services (IL & FS) and Tripura government, created in 2004 for execution of the 726.6 MW combined cycle gas-based thermal power project (using both water and natural gas) at Palatana, 60 km from the state capital, in southern Tripura.

The Palatana power project, expected to ease the power problem of seven of the eight northeastern states, is the biggest gas-based thermal power project in the region.

Dube said that from this power plant, Assam will get the maximum share of 240 MW of electricity followed by Tripura (196 MW), Meghalaya (79 MW), Manipur (42 MW), Nagaland (27 MW), Mizoram (22 MW) and Arunachal Pradesh (22 MW), while IL & FS and OTPC keep 98 MW.

"OTPC has signed a gas sale and purchase agreement with ONGC for supplying 2.65 million metric standard cubic meters gas per day. The agreement would be valid for 15 years against the assumed power plant's life span of 25 years with a provision of further extension by another 10 years," he said.

To set up the Rs.4,047 crore power plant, a total of Rs.10,000 crore is being invested for the project and related works including transmission lines and setting up of ONGC gas pipelines.

"A 400KV high transmission power line (661 km) has been drawn up to Silchar in southern Assam from Palatana to connect with the Bongaigaon national grid in western Assam to distribute electricity to various northeastern states," the OTPC chief said.

"The supply of power to the seven northeastern states would start from Saturday after getting mandatory clearance from the North East Regional Load Despatch Centre in Shillong," he added.

The Palatana project is a hallmark of cooperation between India and Bangladesh, which ensured smooth passage of heavy project equipment and turbines to Palatana through its territory by road and waterways, from Haldia port in West Bengal. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh laid the foundation stone of the power project in October 2005.

ONGC’s first power plant starts commercial generation

 

[cirr]

Economy ends 2013 on sluggish note
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/...013-on-sluggish-note/articleshow/28207041.cms

The author has posted comments on this articleTNN | Jan 1, 2014, 05.24AM IST
NEW DELHI: There was no respite from sluggish data this year. Two sets of data released on Tuesday, the last day of 2013, showed the health of the economy still remained fragile.

During April-November, the fiscal deficit was estimated at nearly Rs 5.1 lakh crore, or 94% of the full-year, estimate of Rs 5.42 lakh crore as revenues remained sluggish and total spending touched 61% of the budget estimate of Rs 16.6 lakh crore.

Separate data showed the core sector grew 1.7% in November 2013 compared to an expansion of 5.8% in the year earlier period. The November data showed some signs of improvement from the previous month when the sector had contracted 0.6%.

The core sector accounts for nearly 38% of the index of industrial production and any sign of improvement in this vital segment augurs well for industrial output. Factory output had contracted 1.8% in October while retail inflation shot up above 11% in November, raising fresh doubts about the health of the economy.

"The sub-2% core sector growth combined with the moderation in the growth of merchandise exports, prevailing issues in the sugar and gems and jewellery sectors, and an uneven uptick in domestic consumption led by rural demand, suggest that industrial growth remained muted in November 2013," ICRA economist Aditi Nayar said in a statement.

But economists cautioned that fiscal situation was a bigger concern. "It will be difficult to meet the target on a business as usual basis," said D K Joshi, chief economist at ratings agency Crisil.

"The government will have to resort to expenditure cuts, rollover expenditure to next year and speed up divestments and finally they will have to dig into dividends from public sector units to keep the fiscal deficit within the target of 4.8% of gross domestic product," said Joshi.

Finance minister P Chidambaram has said the government will not breach the red line on the fiscal deficit and will keep it within the target of 4.8% of GDP.

The core sector, which spans coal, steel, cement, fertilizers, crude oil, natural gas, petroleum refinery products and electricity, has remained volatile in the past few months making it difficult to derive a trend.

But overall, the industrial sector has remained under stress, hit by stubborn inflation, high interest rates, high input costs and rising wage pressures. Investment has remained sluggish as demand remains muted. Economic growth slowed to a decade low of 5% in 2012-13 and is expected to be on similar lines in the current fiscal year.

Two sectors, natural gas and petroleum refinery products, remained laggards. Coal production grew by 2.3% in November from a year earlier, crude oil production increased by 1.1% in November.

Natural Gas production declined by 11.3% in November compared to contraction of 15.1% in November, 2012. Petroleum refinery products fell 5% in November compared with a growth of 29.9% in the year earlier month.

Fertilizer production posted a growth of 0.6% while steel production recorded a growth of 3.9%.

Cement production rose 4.2% in November compared to a decline of 0.2% in November 2012. Electricity generation increased by 5.9% in November compared with a growth 2.9% in the year earlier month

 

[xuxu1457]

 

[cirr]

India factory output slips

January 2014

A Ruchi Soya Industries employee selects a sample bottle of oil for analysis at the company’s edible oil refinery plant in Patalganga. The Statistics Ministry yesterday said the India’s industrial output unexpectedly declined in November on sluggish consumer spending.

Bloomberg/New Delhi

India’s industrial output unexpectedly declined in November on sluggish consumer spending, adding pressure on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to bolster the economy ahead of elections this year.

Output at factories, utilities and mines fell 2.1% from a year earlier after a revised 1.6% contraction in the previous month, the Statistics Ministry said in a statement in New Delhi yesterday. The median of 37 estimates in a Bloomberg News survey was for a 0.8% rise.

The central bank’s effort to control Asia’s fastest consumer price inflation by boosting interest rates has prompted the country’s 1.2bn people to cut back spending as economic growth falters. Singh is under pressure to curb government spending as rating companies threaten to downgrade India to so-called junk status.

“Industrial production data will continue to remain weak,” said Tirthankar Patnaik, a strategist at Religare Capital Markets in Mumbai. “Even though we have bottomed out, it is the recovery that we are worried about.”

The rupee, which has slid about 12% against the dollar in the past 12 months, strengthened 0.3% to 61.905 at the close in Mumbai. The S&P BSE Sensex index advanced 0.2%. The yield on the 10-year government bond maturing November 2023 fell to 8.76% from 8.79% on Wednesday.

Interest rates will remain elevated as long as surging inflation imperils economic growth, K C Chakrabarty, a deputy governor of the country’s central bank, said last week. Consumer prices climbed 11.24% in November. Wholesale inflation was 7.52%, a 14-month high, as onion prices tripled from a year earlier.