News18.com Daybreak | Pink-coloured Economic Survey Is Not All Rosy and Other Stories You May Have Missed
A political row has erupted between the PDP and BJP, the two factions of the coalition government in Jammu and Kashmir, over the FIR filed against the Army personnel in connection with the deaths of two civilians in Shopian district. Angry BJP legislators protested in the state Assembly, demanding that the case be withdrawn, but chief minister Mehbooba Mufti was resolute that it would be taken to its logical conclusion. “I do not accept that the Army gets demoralised by such actions. The Army is an institution and has done a wonderful job. But a black sheep can be anywhere... Among judges, there can be black sheep, but we can't paint everyone with the same brush,” Mufti said.
Congress president Rahul Gandhi will kick off the election campaign of the party in poll-bound Meghalaya from today with a music festival showcasing the cultural diversity of state and will also hold a meeting with religious heads and chiefs of traditional institutions. Election to the 60-member Meghalaya Assembly will be held on February 27.
The Economic Survey paints a rosy picture of what all has gone right – GDP growth has been higher than expected which means the economy is doing well. Inflation – that dreaded price rise monster - has been largely under control and the worrying increase in exports has started to reverse. India remains the second fastest growing economy in the world and will again regain its stature as the fastest growing next fiscal. But not all is rosy. The trouble lies elsewhere. First, farmers are suffering due to declining incomes. Two, the fiscal deficit target for this year is unlikely to be met due to GST issues – which means we will earn less than what we thought we would at the beginning of the year and may need to borrow more. And, there’s more.
The pink-color Economic Survey 2017-18 tabled in Parliament on Monday laid emphasis on gender issues and the preference for a male child in Indian society. The survey noted that the ‘son preference’ was giving rise to sex selective abortion and differential survival has led to skewed sex ratios at birth and beyond. This has further led to an estimated 63 million ‘missing women.’
The 2018 Economic Survey tabled by Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley makes a strong case for representation of women in the Parliament. It draws a comparison with Rwanda which had more than 60 percent of its women in its Parliament in 2017; Indian, on the other hand, had only 11 percent of them in its Parliament. Curiously, the survey does not mention the Women's Reservation Bill.
Bollywood actor Sunny Deol's iconic dialogue 'tarikh-par-tarikh' (dates after dates) has found a mention in the Economic Survey.
The National Investigation Agency (NIA) has taken over up the probe into the alleged forced religious conversion of Akshara Bose, who had moved the Kerala High Court last year, alleging that she was forced to convert to Islam by her husband, who then tried to sell her to the Islamic State in Syria as a sex slave.
Observing that she should behave like a “good daughter-in-law”, the Supreme Court has said that a fugitive businesswoman residing in London will have to come back to "hell" once her days in "heaven" outside India get over. "This is hell...there (in UK) it will be heaven for her but we will not let her live in the heaven for long. We will take all steps possible to get her back," said a bench headed by Justice Arun Mishra.
A group of students of an Industrial Training Institute in Madhya Pradesh have pledged not to vote for Bharatiya Janata Party unless online exams are scrapped.
The Supreme Court has issued contempt notices to three states- Rajasthan, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh - for allegedly failing to stop incidents of cow vigilantism despite the top court's order last year to do so. The states have been asked to reply to the notice by September 3.
The BJP accounted for 89% or Rs 290.22 crore of the donations made to political parties through electoral trusts in 2016-17, a report has revealed. Nine other parties received Rs 35.05 crore in total.
A 1981-batch IFS officer, India’s new foreign secretary Vijay Gokhale is also a Mandarin speaker. One of his very first assignments was in the Indian Consulate in Hong Kong, back in the early 1980s. Gokhale also represents a new breed of ‘China hands’ at the MEA. A breed that believes in directly and bluntly speaking to the Chinese without being bleary-eyed about the past or the future. But it’s not just China that he’ll have to contend with. India’s Pakistan policy is a mess. All in all, the next two years are going to be exciting, to say the least.
Agree or disagree?
We all agree that equality is a right and not just an idea in our country. However, the complexities of our society don’t always allow it to play out in our day to day lives. Sushmita Dev, the president of the All India Mahila Congress and MP from Silchar, writes an open letter to the Finance Minister, explaining why taxes on sanitary pads must go. “While our government consistently brags about reforms and hammers at financial reform, social reforms take a back seat. The question they need to ask themselves is whether accepting to make napkins free will help save more women to survive with dignity than a cylinder of cooking gas and empower many by fighting the stigma attached to menstruation,” she writes.