December 2019

Government can’t take suo motu action to revive telecom sector: Piyush Goyal NEW DELHI: Commerce and Industry minister Piyush Goyal Monday ruled out any suo motu or proactive support to the ailing telecom sector but said that the government is in continuous discussions with the industry. “Government proactively or suo motu cannot take an action on this (AGR) but I assure you that we are in continuous dialogue,” Goyal said, and added that the revenue issue pertains between the top court and the industry. source:

Confident of recovering over 50% of IL&FS’ dues: Uday Kotak Mumbai: Noted banker Uday Kotak on Tuesday said the country’s financial system is currently in a Darwinian mode as only the fittest lenders are able to survive. The Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Kotak Mahindra Bank also that historically, whenever there has been a problem with a private sector lender, it has been merged with a state-run bank. “India is in massive Darwinian mode of what I call as the survival of the fittest. “Sector after sector has seen that it is going to be more consolidated than ever...

Laxmi Agarwal, whose life inspired Deepika Padukone’s Chhapaak, paid merely Rs 15 lakh for film’s rights? Ever since the trailer of director Meghna Gulzar’s Chhapaak starring Deepika Padukone has been released, the movie has been the right noise on social media as well as among the film fraternity. Deepika even broke down at the trailer launch that touched many hearts. However, if the latest reports are to be believed, Laxmi Agarwal, whose life as an acid attack survivor has inspired Chhapaak, is reportedly not been given proper financial due for the film rights. According to Bollywood Hungama, a kind of...

Hrithik Roshan’s Super 30 likely to be remade in Hollywood: report Hrithik Roshan’s film Super 30 may soon become Bollywood’s first film to be remade in Hollywood, reports suggest. The film also starred Mrunal Thakur and Pankaj Tripathi in important roles. An Asian Age report quoted a source as saying, “Super 30 is one of the finest subjects that has come out from India in the recent past. And with Indian stories finding worldwide acceptance, this subject too is expected to work globally. A Hollywood major has shown interest in the subject, and writer Sanjiv Dutta is expected to pen the film in...

Vistara’s Chief Commercial Officer Sanjiv Kapoor has resigned from the post, the airline said on Monday. The company said that Kapoor had stepped down from his post last month. The airline’s Chief Strategy Officer Vinod Kannan will take over as the CCO. In a statement, Vistara said that Kapoor had resigned due to personal reasons. Kapoor’s last day with the airline will be on December 31. source:

India should focus on structural reforms, clean-up of banks and labour reforms: Gita Gopinath With economic growth slowing to a six-year low, IMF Chief Economist Gita Gopinath says the government should undertake structural reforms such as bank clean-up and labour reforms to address the slowdown in domestic demand. Gopinath, 48, who is travelling to India this week, rooted for government policies focusing on managing a slowdown in domestic demand, and on boosting productivity growth and supporting employment creation in the medium term. source:

123 tweets in two hours: Trump makes Twitter record amid impeachment charges Washington: US President Donald Trump made a Twitter record when he tweeted a whopping 123 times in a couple of hours against the House Judiciary Committee’s decision to initiate impeachment charges against him. A bitterly divided Judicial Committee voted on Friday to present two scaled-down charges against Trump to the House of Representatives for impeaching him, setting in motion a historic process. This left Trump angry on Twitter which he calls his “typewriter”. source:

Deepika Padukone Wins Crystal Award For Raising Mental Health Awareness Actress Deepika Padukone has been honoured by the 26th Annual Crystal Award for raising mental health awareness. She is the only Indian actress to feature in Davos 2020 winners list. Honoured to receive the award, Deepika Padukone said: “With more than 300 million people suffering with the illness, depression is the leading cause of ill health and disability in the world today and a major contributor to the overall global burden of disease. It is therefore increasingly clear that, now more than ever before, we need to aggressively address what...

Boris Johnson’s big win in UK polls, ‘special relationship’ with Narendra Modi lays base for closer ties between Britain and India The massive win that Boris Johnson-led Conservative Party scored in UK’s most consequential general election, among other things, augurs well for ties between India and Britain. New Delhi would be considerably comfortable in dealing with Johnson — whom leftist British newspaper The Guardian has called a “sociopathic, narcissistic, glutton for power” — than leftist Jeremy Corbyn whose extreme anti-India posturing alienated most British-Indian voters who have traditionally voted Labour. This isn’t to say that desertion by the British-Indians, a 1.5 lakh-strong influential...

Slowdown Blues: It’s not ordinary but ‘Great Slowdown’, Indian economy headed towards ICU, says ex-CEA Arvind Subramanian Former Chief Economic Adviser Arvind Subramanian has said the Indian economy was headed towards an “intensive care unit” and that a “Great Slowdown” was imminent. The former chief economic adviser said the country was experiencing what he calls the “second wave” of Twin Balance Sheet (TBS) crisis, which will further lead to an even bigger damage to the economy. source: