While the RBI will be fully informed about retail inflation for all three quarters only by October 12, the CPI-based inflation is expected to remain above the 6 per cent upper limit in the July-September quarter too. (PTI)India Top News Briefing Live: The Reserve Bank of India will call a special meeting of its Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) after October 12 to discuss a report it will have to submit to the Union government explaining the reasons for the average retail inflation remaining above the upper tolerance limit of 6 per cent for three consecutive quarters. Notably, in eight years, this will be the first time the RBI would have let retail inflation slip beyond the upper tolerance limit of 6 per cent for three straight quarters.
In an interview with The Indian Express, over a year after the Taliban regime took over in Afghanistan, the country’s former President, Hamid Karzai, said that he had urged Indian Ambassador Rudrendra Tandon not to leave. “There was no reason for India to leave, I am glad they are coming back. I’ve been urging Indian government leaders to re-open the embassy,” he said. Karzai, who studied in India from 1979-1983, said Delhi must, “on priority”, reissue visas to Afghan students who were studying in India, and have not been able to return.
In our opinion section today, Bina Agarwal writes on the long road ahead for women at home and at the workplace: “We have a long way to travel from an Independence Day speech about respecting women, delivered from the ramparts of the Red Fort, to creating decent jobs and respectful workspaces for them. That is where the demographic dividend really lies.”
Meanwhile, 19 Covid clusters were found in the Mahadevapura zone of Bengaluru and two in the West zone of the city.
Surat: Locals wade through a waterlogged street following incessant monsoon rainfall, in Surat, Thursday, Aug. 18, 2022. (PTI Photo)
There is an old saying: “Building the road is the first step to becoming prosperous”. In recent years, India has made a significant effort to become a digital society by building a large citizen-scale digital public infrastructure. The Government of India and Reserve Bank of India (RBI) have been promoting simplification and transparency to increase the speed of interaction between individuals, markets, and the government. With the commencement of the Digital India mission in 2015, our payments, provident fund, passports, driving licences, crossing tolls, and checking land records all have been transformed with modular applications built on Aadhaar, UPI, and the India Stack. Read more.
Over 25 days starting July 20, the family of nine-year-old Indra Kumar Meghwal, the Dalit boy from Jalore who was assaulted, allegedly by his upper-caste teacher, desperately rushed him from one hospital to another, covering close to 1,300 kilometres across Rajasthan and Gujarat before he died in an Ahmedabad hospital — the eighth he had been taken to — on the morning of August 13.
His family had said that he was assaulted, allegedly for drinking water from a pot reserved for the upper-caste teacher. Read more.
As India was preparing to shut down its embassy in Kabul on August 15 last year in the wake of the Taliban takeover, Hamid Karzai urged Indian Ambassador Rudrendra Tandon not to leave, the former President of Afghanistan said in an interview to The Indian Express.
“Well, of course, it was very clear that I advised him not to leave,” Karzai said, declining to give details of that conversation. “There was no reason for India to leave, I am glad they are coming back. I’ve been urging Indian government leaders to re-open the embassy. There’s so much relationship between Afghanistan and India that requires India’s presence here. Active full strength presence here. So I’m glad they are returning. And I want them to return full-fledged, full force.” Read more.
The Reserve Bank of India will call a special meeting of its Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) after October 12 to discuss a report it will have to submit to the Union government explaining the reasons for the average retail inflation remaining above the upper tolerance limit of 6 per cent for three consecutive quarters.
The Union government, in consultation with the RBI, fixes the inflation target for the central bank every five years. It had fixed it at 4 per cent plus/ minus 2 per cent (upper limit 6 per cent, lower limit 2 per cent) for the period August 5, 2016 to March 31, 2021, and retained it for the next five years ending March 31, 2026. Read more.
Union minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar took a short break from work to be on a spiritual journey — he went to climb the Sabarimala for a darshan of Lord Ayyappa.
Chandrasekhar, who has been visiting the shrine in Kerala for 25 years — he missed it in the last two years due to the pandemic — made the trek on Thursday. The 58-year-old Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology said he took an hour and 30 minutes to complete the climb.
Although the minister was there for his annual prayers, devotees did not leave him without clicking mandatory selfies with him. Read more.