UN Secretary General calls on President

His Excellency Mr. Ban Ki-moon, Secretary General of the United Nations called on President of India, Shri Pranab Mukherjee at Rashtrapati Bhavan today (January 13, 2015).

Welcoming the UN Secretary General to India, the President said the UN is in urgent need of reform for its own credibility and legitimacy of its decisions. The UN should play an effective role in all situations. A reformed and effective UN will be able to respond to the crises afflicting the world in a more decisive manner. The United Nations needs to represent the geo-political realities of today.

The President said it was true there are divergences on the reforms. But the UN has been created to iron out these divergences and find solutions acceptable to the large section of the international community. Reforms of the United Nations should be advanced at least in the 70th year of the UN. India hopes and counts upon the UN Secretary General’s leadership and persuasive skills to steer the discussions for urgent reform of the UN.

Drawing attention to the recent terrorist incidents in Peshawar and Paris, the President said terrorism was no longer a debating issue. Terrorists engage in wanton destruction and show no respect for borders or values. The international community must assert itself and tackle the problem of terrorism. The UN Secretary General should take the initiative in this regard.

The President expressed his happiness that the international community is working to finalise a set of SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) and a comprehensive post-2015 development agenda. He said tackling the issue of global warming or climate change requires both serious national action and genuine international collaboration. Despite huge development challenges, India is undertaking ambitious climate actions including through lowering of the energy intensity of its economic growth, increasing energy efficiency across sectors and making greater use of renewable energy. Pointing out that India became a member of the UN in 1945 even before we attained independence, the President said Indian Armed Forces participate in 10 out of the 16 UN peacekeeping mission with 8000 plus troops and police personnel. India is firm in its commitment to the UN Charter and support of the UN system.

Responding to the President, the UN Secretary General said India is a critically important global power. He has therefore visited the country regularly in order to forge a stronger partnership between the UN and India. He agreed that the international community should take firm action on the matter of terrorism. There was huge solidarity expressed by the world after the incident in Paris but committed action is even more important.

The UN Secretary General expressed appreciation for the contributions of India to peace keeping operations and the promotion of global democracy. He pointed out that India was the second largest donor to the Democracy Fund, next only to the United States. He also congratulated India for the measures being taken for gender empowerment and appreciated the fact that 25% of the Cabinet were women. He said he was aware of the aspirations of many countries including India for reforms of the UN and their desire to play a leadership role in the UN Security Council. The UN Security Council must become effective, representative, democratic and transparent.

Green building

Green building of the Environment Ministry showcased to the UN Secretary General Shri Prakash Javadekar meets UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon

The Minister for Environment, Forests and Climate Change, Shri Prakash Javadekar today met the UN Secretary General, Mr. Ban Ki-moon at the New Paryavarn Bhavan Building.  Shri Javadekar showcased to the Secretary General salient features of the Green Building and highlighted that the design philosophy of the New Paryavaran Bhavan  focused  on increasing the efficiency of resource usage i.e. energy, water and materials while minimizing the impact of the building on Human Habitat and the Environment.              Shri Javadekar further said that this had been achieved through careful site planning, most appropriate building form and very low effluent disposal and energy production on-site.  The objective was to have a ‘Green Building’ with a state of art modern amenities and comfort with Intelligent Building Management System which optimizes the energy consumption. The basic design concept of the project was to have a  NET ZERO ENERGY consuming green building.  It was expected to be the flag bearer for ‘Green Buildings’. The building has the highest green building rating of ‘5star’of GRIHA of Ministry of New & Renewable Energy and also ‘Platinum’ rating of LEED India of Indian Green Building Council.             The architectural design of the building is primarily based on following concepts. ·     Preservation of maximum possible number of trees standing over the site ·     Solar Passive Architecture with proper orientation and shading of Fenestrations ·     Appropriate building envelope design with envelope insulation to reduce heat intake. ·     Use of permanent, durable and local materials such as sand stone on exterior face, low heat transmission glass, reflective roofing, etc. ·     Priority for pedestrians in the front, with vehicular access on the sides of the building ·     Reduction of conventional lighting load by ensuring 75% day-light use ·     Natural ventilation due to stack effect ·     The building is designed in such a way that there is free ventilation across the entire building. Energy Conservation Measures o       Many energy conservation measures have been adopted to optimize the overall design load. o       Utilization of High Efficiency Solar Panels to achieve Net Zero criteria. Energy efficient T-5 and LED fixtures o       Innovative chilled beam system for cooling o       Pre-cooling of fresh air from exhaust using heat recovery wheel in order to reduce load on chiller plant o       Water cooled chillers o       Double skin air handling units with variable frequency drives o       Geo thermal heat exchange technology used for heat rejection from Air-conditioning system. o       Innovative energy saving regenerative lifts which have been installed for the first time in government institutional building. Mr Ban Ki-moon also planted a sapling at the premises jointly with Shri Prakash Javadekar to mark the occasion.

TEN QUOTES

Swami Vivekananda was instrumental in introducing the Indian philosophies of Vedanta to the western world. Best remembered for his inspiring words, he continues to live on in his quotes. On his birth anniversary, here’s listing 10 of his best motivational quotes. Which one of your favourite? Tell us and share it with your friends.

1. You cannot believe in God until you believe in yourself.
- Swami Vivekananda

You cannot believe in God until you believe in yourself

2. Arise! Awake! and stop not until the goal is reached.

- Swami Vivekananda

Arise! Awake! and stop not until the goal is reached.

3. You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul.
- Swami Vivekananda

You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul.

4. “In a conflict between the heart and the brain, follow your heart.”
- Swami Vivekananda

“In a conflict between the heart and the brain, follow your heart.

5. “They alone live, who live for others.”
- Swami Vivekananda

“They alone live, who live for others.”

6. “Neither seek nor avoid, take what comes.”
- Swami Vivekananda

“Neither seek nor avoid, take what comes.”

7. “Comfort is no test of truth. Truth is often far from being comfortable.”
- Swami Vivekananda

“Comfort is no test of truth. Truth is often far from being comfortable.”

8. “The fire that warms us can also consume us; it is not the fault of the fire.”
- Swami Vivekananda

“The fire that warms us can also consume us; it is not the fault of the fire.”

9. “Ask nothing; want nothing in return. Give what you have to give; it will come back to you, but do not think of that now.”
- Swami Vivekananda

“Ask nothing; want nothing in return. Give what you have to give; it will come back to you, but do not think of that now.”

10. “Do one thing at a Time, and while doing it put your whole Soul into it to the exclusion of all else.”
- Swami Vivekananda

“Do one thing at a Time, and while doing it put your whole Soul into it to the exclusion of all else.” - 

India’s Mars Orbiter team wins US award

India’s Mars Orbiter programme team has won the 2015 Space Pioneer Award in the science and engineering category from the US based National Space Society (NSS), the society said.

In a statement issued in Washington on Monday, the NSS said its 2015 Space Pioneer Award in the science and engineering category has been won by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Mars Orbiter Programme team.

“This award will be presented to an ISRO representative during the National Space Society’s 2015 International Space Development Conference, the 34th ISDC, to be held in Toronto, Canada,” the statement said.

The conference will run form May 20-24.

According to the NSS, India’s Mars Orbiter launched on Nov 5, 2013 that went into Mars orbit on Sep 24, 2014 achieved two significant mission firsts in terms of an Indian spacecraft that has gone into orbit around Mars on the very first try and that no other country has ever done this. Secondly, the spacecraft is in an elliptical orbit with a high apoapsis, and has a high resolution camera which is taking full-disk colour imagery of Mars.

Very few full disk images have ever been taken in the past, mostly on approach to the planet, as most imaging is done looking straight down in mapping mode.

These images will aid planetary scientists.

The Mars Orbiter programme team located in Bangalore is headed by Mylswamy Annadurai, the statement said.

The NSS is an independent non-profit educational membership organisation dedicated to the creation of a space faring civilisation.

Hail the invisible hand of the state

The current debate in India about how to trigger a quantum jump in industrial manufacturing activity and, thus, create large-scale employment is largely centred on ways to reduce the role of the state - in allotting land, in environmental clearances, in firing workers and so on. Yet the case studies of two industries that came from origins even smaller than where manufacturing is today and have become international success stories - the Indian pharma industry and the Indian information technology (IT) services industry - proves the opposite point. Neither would have come to their current stellar role in the Indian economy without the active but largely invisible hand of the Indian state.

The Indian pharma industry has grown from minuscule revenues in the late 1960s to a world player with an annual revenue of $40 billion (of which $15 billion is in exports) and an activity base of 20,000 plus manufacturing units employing over 29 million people. The case of the software services industry is even more striking; it employed just 8,500 people in 1990 and had a revenue of a mere $165 million (tiny Ireland had a $185-million software industry at that time). Today, its size is $118 billion, with $100 billion as exports. The people directly employed in the industry is reported as exceeding two million, with another seven million employed indirectly. Both these industries have also created multiplier effects in sectors such as housing construction, transport services and household goods, as young chemists and programmers set up homes, and bought cars and home appliances.

What was the magic? Unfortunately, finding the key to these success stories is like that old tale of the blind men of "Hindoostan", who, when asked to describe an elephant, said that it was like a wall, snake, spear, tree, fan or rope, depending upon which part of the elephant each touched.

Proponents of the "market economy" will say that the success of these two industries is an example of what energetic Indian entrepreneurs can achieve when the government of India steps aside. Reinforcing this view is India's business press, which frequently features stories about software and pharma industry millionaires. Proponents of "globalisation", such as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, in his book The World Is Flat, credit globalisation: increased world trade that spreads prosperity around the world. Proponents of "privatisation" say that decades of public sector efforts in these industries (Electronics Corporation of India in the case of IT and Hindustan Antibiotics are often quoted as examples) came to nothing until the private sector was "allowed" to participate. To them, this is proof that the government needs to privatise many other industries as well. And, of course, there are those that say that the state's only role should be to provide zero income tax on export incomes, government-sponsored software parks and export zones.

But actual case studies of these two industries tell another story. The rise of the Indian software services industry can be traced back to two mega projects sponsored by the Union government: the computerisation of public sector banks and Indian Railways. These two projects, apart from providing an impetus to the start-up and growth of hundreds of software development companies, also had another dimension. Far-sighted government policymakers like N Seshagiri of what was then called the department of electronics, the forerunner to the current ministry of IT, insisted that these applications be built using such technologies as the Unix operating system and relational database systems; the world was then getting ready for a paradigm change that would unleash an insatiable wave of demand for computer programmers well versed in these specific technologies as the world shifted from mainframe computers to client server computers. Thanks to the banking and the railway projects, Indian companies had a ready stock of thousands of software programmers well versed in these new technologies, who could be immediately deployed on assignments abroad.

The rise of India's pharmaceutical industry is based on similar visionary moves by the Indian state. In 1970, the government introduced a new patents Act reforming the 1911 one, which excluded pharmaceuticals and agrochemical products from eligibility for patents. Patents on molecules, which are products of chemical reactions or on mere admixtures and the like, were made non-patentable in India. Only the method of making the product was patentable. This resulted in the Indian pharmaceutical industry developing considerable expertise in reverse engineering of drugs that are patentable as products throughout the industrialised world but not in India.

You need to peer really hard to detect this kind of invisible hand of the state. Mariana Mazzucato, professor of science and technology at the University of Sussex and the author of The Entrepreneurial State - Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths, did just that and uncovered the role of the American state behind what is generally seen as the ultimate artifact of entrepreneurial vision, the Apple iPhone. "What actually makes the iPhone a smartphone, instead of a stupid phone?" she asks in a recent TED talk. And answers that it is the internet; the Global Positioning System (GPS), which detects your geographic location; the touchscreen display that makes it also a really easy-to-use phone. She points out that "the very smart, revolutionary bits about the iPhone, are … all government-funded … the Internet was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the United States. The GPS was funded by the [United States] military's Navstar program … the touchscreen display was funded by two public grants by the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] and the US National Science Foundation", and in the American pharmaceutical industry, "a full 75 percent of the new molecular entities with priority rating are actually funded in boring, Kafkian [United States government] public sector labs".

From Yojana to NITI

There once was a time when the belief prevailed that theeconomy was some intricate Rube Goldberg contraption of connected pulleys, cogs, levers and conveyor belts that achieved desired results by pressing required buttons. And it wasn't confined to the Fabian acolyte Jawaharlal Nehru. The whole world recovering from ravages of a global war (and the depression preceding it) subscribed to it. John Maynard Keynes was the high priest of pump-priming to get economies going. The showcase of the Soviet Union's achievements post-war was accepted as proof positive of efficacy of planning.

Thus was born the Planning Commission of India in 1950, charged with the task of fostering development. Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced its imminent replacement in his Independence Day address, but the new name, structure and key personnel became known only a week ago.

From When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth ...
India was the first non-Communist practitioner of central planning. Economists worldwide keenly watched the experiment. The starting point was the celebrated Harrod-Domar model. In essence, it suggested with breath-taking simplicity that savings, which were exogenous, equalled investment, which in turn bore a fixed relationship with the rate of growth. Ergo, all that was required to achieve the desired rate of growth (the model made no distinction between growth and development) was to crank up savings to the required level.

But macroeconomic policy design remained largely in the realm of guesswork, as it does even today in countries with far more reliable databases. Disaggregation followed with the Mahalanobis two-sector models and the Leontief intersectoral transaction tables. The commission set sector-specific output and investment targets based on them. It had the final say on resource allocations, and told the states not just what to do but how to do it as well.

"Quantitative targeting of domestic production became irrelevant ... [because of] obsolete methodology ... and working practices," Nitin Desai observed in these pages ("RIP Planning Commission", Business Standard, August 21, 2014) and with good reasons. Plan funds were tied to the straitjacket of the commission designs. These comprised more often than not recycled versions of tried, trusted and failed schemes, since powerful interests, political as well as bureaucratic, demanded their continuation. States became increasingly frustrated with this approach, but yielded to the agency controlling funding. A measure of arbitrariness was evident as early as 1980. I prepared a note about this and V Kurien took it to a commission meeting. It received a barely polite hearing. The Maharashtra government's earnest pleas for effecting modifications to the prime minister's package for suicide-prone districts in the late 2000s fell on deaf ears.

The Planning Commission had morphed into Tyrannosaurus rex.

... to Where Eagles Dare?
The dysfunctional evolution of the Planning Commission provides two vital lessons to the new NITI Aayog. One, it must give up the impossible task of modelling and prescribing for a continental macroeconomy, and two, it must give up the obsession to micromanage projects on the ground. It ought to concentrate on key interventions cutting across states and subject disciplines instead. That would enable it to carve out a unique role for itself offering innovative approaches in this era of new federalism.

Here is a sampler of such projects, all high on the government priority list:

The Northeast: The region remains a distant outpost full of promise and poverty. Decades of grand assurances from central agencies brought it not improved connectivity but varieties of rice not suited to the local palate and fruit-processing plants without matching logistics and marketing support. No other territory has suffered as much from the Planning Commission's dogged prescription of one-size-fits-all schemes. Its potential - hydropower, horticulture, tourism, craftsmanship - remains barely exploited, adding to the already enormous sense of alienation. Inclusiveness acquires an added, more urgent dimension east of Kolkata.

Ganga renaissance: The premier river system continues to suffer unimaginable degradation even as thousands of crores have gone down the drain in the last 30 years. The problem is not just of cleaning up, but also of rejuvenation of sources and managing the sedimentation. That calls for a varied pool of knowledge and experience. Setting up a few waste-treatment plants does not even scratch the surface. And at least half a dozen states with a third of the country's population must be on board.

Sagarmala: India's large coastline and its location has become a security concern when it could be its greatest asset in an interdependent world. Infrastructure is only the beginning. Ports must be connected through cost-effective multi-modal transport network to hinterland manufacturing facilities competitively producing goods for the world market. When discounted for quality and labour productivity, the much-touted Indian cost advantage often disappears altogether. "Make in India" subsumes some of these concerns and must be linked to the project.

All these projects require large commitments of resources. More importantly, they need out-of-the-box solutions based on multi-domain expertise and situation-specific improvisations, not lazy stereotyping. Above all, they must be pursued with a sense of urgency. In other words, tasks cut out for an ideal NITI Aayog.

This is only for starters. But the new body must learn to hasten slowly and establish its credentials through actions.

The extinct dinosaurs have left two vastly different descendants: the loathsome lizards and crocodiles resembling their forebear, and the graceful birds. That just about sums up possibilities for the NITI Aayog.

How GST will benefit traders and manufacturers

Concept of manufacture will be replaced by value added which is numerically measureable and is not controversial

I found during my interaction with traders and manufacturers that they are essentially interested to know about the structure of GST and the benefits that are likely to come to them. The benefits are common in many cases, but are also different in some other respects. I propose to discuss these specific aspects in this article. The advantages for manufacturers and traders are the following:

• One tax: The common base for charging GST for Centre and the state will consist of an amalgamation (subsuming) of several central taxes and state taxes which will enable them to give one tax rather than giving about 16 taxes.
• Common market: There will be a common market in the absence of CST and entry tax. At present, goods are being sold mostly within the state in order to avoid paying the CST which is not credited at the stage of manufacture or in course of trading. Good quality products being manufactured in one part of the country will find more market in the farthest part of the country because there will be no CST and no entry tax
• Distinction between goods and services will go: In some cases, there is a distinction between goods and services when they are sold as a package. These controversies will go.
• Invoicing will be simpler: At present, the invoices are more detailed since taxes on goods and services are written separately for one transaction. With the introduction of GST only one rate will be written.
• No entry tax: The Economist November 8, 2014 has reported (page 67) that India's long distance truckers are parked 60 per cent of the time. This also leads to delaying of delivery of goods at destinations. The abolition of entry tax will be a great boon for the movement of goods by road transport.
• Common exemptions between Centre and states: Now the exemptions given by the Centre and the states being different, the final price becomes different in different states. In the GST regime, exemptions will be common between the Centre and the states which will make the rates of duty same all over India.
• Big central excise tariff will go: I will be the happiest to see when this big and fat central excise tariff goes away. It has got eight digit classifications like 44079990, 76069110. They attract different rates many times. All these will be replaced by one rate. What a relief!
• Concept of manufacture will go: Manufacture is a highly complicated concept. It is defined mostly by judgements of Supreme Court and high courts. It is a den of controversy. The concept of manufacture will be replaced by the concept of value added which is numerically measureable and is not controversial.
• Classification controversies will go: Now, classification controversies are galore since there are so many rates of duty. This problem will also go if the exemptions are limited.
• Problem of identification will go: At present, identifying a commodity like whether it is rubber or resin, paper or board, ash, or dross dominate the proceedings since rates of duty are different. These controversies will be over.
• Undue enrichment law will go: At present, there is a law in central excise and service tax which provide for refusing refund of higher duty paid in case the burden of higher rate of tax imposed already has not been passed on to the consumer. This is a highly litigated law which will necessarily have to go because GST will be a combination of so many taxes apart from these two taxes. And these taxes do not have the same provision. Moreover, if the unjust enrichment of law is made to apply to GST as a whole, the purpose of seamless movement of goods and services will be defeated.
• Zero rating will be more comprehensive and more easy: Even without GST, zero rating (giving relief for the input duty) is possible, but it does not give relief for some of the duties. With GST, zero rating will be more comprehensive.