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HPCL to set up
Bathinda refinery on Punjab terms
Thailand approves
82 items for FTA
Youth joblessness
dragging down world economy: ILO ICICI Lombard
scheme for farmers |
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Eicher to roll out 25-tonner
in Oct
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HPCL to set up Bathinda refinery on Punjab terms Bathinda, August 12 Punjab Finance Minister Surinder Singla told TNS today that the oil refinery project worth crores of rupees would be implemented by HPCL without any facility of sales tax deferment for 15 years by the state government, which was extended to HPCL by the previous SAD-BJP combine government in its deed of assurance given to it. He claimed that positive signals were being received from the quarters where the matter pertaining to the implementation of the project had been taken up by the state government. The work was going on the oil refinery and it would be speeded up shortly. “The Punjab Government will impress upon the Union Finance Minister, Mr P. Chidambaram, to ask the Petroleum Minister, Mr Mani Shankar Aiyer, to direct HPCL to complete the refinery without seeking any sales tax deferment for 15 years. The matter will also be discussed by a committee headed by the Chief Secretary, Punjab, in which officials of petroleum ministry and Chairman, HPCL will put forth their views,” said Mr Singla. He adding that Chief Minister Amarinder Singh had already talked twice with Mr Aiyar on this issue. He said he would raise this issue at the meeting of the Empowered Committee of Finance Ministers to be held on August 17 in New Delhi. He said that facility of sales tax deferment to HPCL would mean that state would suffer huge loss of thousands of crores not only in the shape of sales tax but also in the shape of interest on the amount of sales tax, which would be around Rs 15,000 crore. “The total equity of HPCL in oil refinery project will be Rs 5,200 crore. The rest of the amount will be generated by it through loans. The amount of interest on the amount of sale tax deferment for 15 years will be Rs 8000 crore. These figures show that HPCL will set up oil refinery project at the cost of the revenue of the Punjab Government,” he pointed out. The Finance Minister asked how a state could allow any PSU, including HPCL, to commit an economic crime with resources or extort from it. The state would have to have adequate funds to meet its responsibilities. No other state had been extending the facility of sale tax deferment to any refinery in the country. The state government could not allow any PSU to tax its resources under the garb of offer of a big investment in any project. He said it was unfortunate that previous SAD-BJP combine government extended a deed of assurance to HPCL in connection with the sales tax deferment without bothering about the economic interests of Punjab. He added that it was more disappointing that previous BJP led NDA government and SAD-BJP combine government in Punjab could not complete the oil refinery project in full five years.
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Task forces set up to recover tax arrears
New Delhi, August 12 The task forces have been set up in pursuance of the Finance Minister P. Chidambaram’s announcement to launch a special drive to recover arrears by both the Central Board of Direct Taxes and Central Board of Excise and Customs. No new posts would be created for the task forces. While the task force on direct taxes would be headed by Member (Revenue), that on indirect taxes would be headed by Chief Commissioner (Tax Arrear and Recovery), an official release said. The task forces, which would start functioning from today, would report to the respective boards. Concerned over a whopping Rs 87,000-crore direct tax arrears, Chidambaram had recently said a “sizeable amount” of this was undisputed and recoverable. While chalking out an action plan, Chidambaram wanted to put in place a proper producer at the Chief Commissioners’ and Income Tax Appellate Tribunal levels to collect a tidy sum of about Rs 7,000-8,000 crore which were easily recoverable. The Finance Minister would be approaching the Chief Justice of India and also Chief Justices of High Courts to take up big tax cases quickly.
— PTI
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Aiyar, oil PSUs discuss merger
New Delhi, August 12 The brainstorming session was part of Aiyar’s efforts to prepare India’s response to global oil challenge by unifying public sector oil firms instead of the present practice of competing against each other and working at cross purpose. Sources said Aiyar had taken a grim view of the presence of three public sector oil marketing companies — the Indian Oil Corp, the Bharat Petroleum Corp and the Hindustan Petroleum Corp — vying for the same market and more like Numaligarh Refinery, the MRPL and the Oil and Natural Gas Corp ready to enter the market. He was also ‘disturbed’ at every PSU’s move to buy oil and gas fields abroad, a trend that may see Indian firms competing among themselves for the very limited assets available. One of the proposal was for merging about 11,000 petrol stations and 32 million tonnes per annum refining capacity of HPCL and BPCL with ONGC to make the country’s largest oil producer a vertically integrated firm. Simultaneously, oil producer Oil India Ltd and ONGC’s Assam and Gujarat oil fields would be given to IOC to provide India’s largest retailing firms the control of close to 12 million tonnes of crude oil. Sources said the merger proposal was opposed by the BPCL and the HPCL who wanted more freedom to enter oil and gas exploration and production to become vertically integrated companies. Alternatively, Aiyar also looked at options of restricting the companies to only their core competencies instead of the oil producers getting into the fuel marketing and retailers venturing into upstream business.
— PTI
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Thailand approves 82 items for FTA
New Delhi, August 12 He said the customs duty on these items would be reduced by 50 per cent with effect from September 1, 2004. The next reduction of 25 per cent would be effected from September 1, 2005 and zero per cent duty would be effective from September 1, 2006. The minister was speaking at the Seminar on ‘’India — Thailand: The Road Ahead’’, organised jointly by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and Federation of Thai Industries, past evening. Mr Thapparansi said he expected the volume of trade to increase from the existing $ 1.2 billion to $ 2.1 billion. He said India was a strong economy and was rich in both technology and human resources. He further said 100 Thai scientists would participate in a science camp at Infosys, Bangalore in November 2004. The Thai Minister said Thailand had entered into an FTA with China in 2003 and the FTA with India would enable the two largest consumer markets to come together and reach each other’s markets through Thailand. He urged industry to take advantage of the tremendous business opportunity. Minister of State for Commerce and Industry E.V.K.S. Elangovan, reiterated the commitment to existing ties between India and Thailand and said the FTA would further strengthen the economic ties.
— UNI
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Youth joblessness dragging down New York, August 12 “We are wasting an important part of the energy and talent of the most-educated young generation the world has ever had,” International Labour Organisation (ILO) Director-General Juan Somavia said. “Enlarging the chances of young people to find and keep decent work is absolutely critical to achieving the UN Millennium Development Goals.” These goals, set by the UN Millennium Summit of 2000, call for achieving a set of specific targets by 2015, including halving of the extreme poverty and hunger and slashing of the child and maternal mortality rates. Giving the grim statistics in a new report, ILO says young persons aged 15 to 24 represent nearly half of the world’s jobless although they are only 25 per cent of the working-age population. Halving world youth unemployment rate would add at least $2.2 trillion to global gross domestic product (GDP) equal to around 4 per cent of the 2003 value, says the report — “Global Employment Trends for Youth 2004”. The relative disadvantage of youth, it stresses, is more
pronounced in developing countries, where they make up a strikingly higher proportion of the labour force than in industrialised economies. Eighty-five per cent of the world’s youth live in the developing countries where they are 3.8 times more likely to be unemployed than adults, as compared with 2.3 times in the industrialised economies. But the problem, the ILO says, goes far beyond the large number of young unemployed people - 47 per cent of the total 186 million people out of work worldwide in 2003. Young people also represent 130 million of the world’s 550 million working poor who are unable to lift themselves and their families above the equivalent of the one dollar per day poverty line. These young people struggle to survive, often performing work under unsatisfactory conditions in the informal economy, it adds. The report puts global youth unemployment at 14.4 per cent in 2003, a 26.8 per cent increase over the past decade, with rates highest in the Middle East and North Africa (25.6 per cent), followed by sub-Saharan Africa (21 per cent), transition economies (18.6 per cent), Latin America and the Caribbean (16.6 per cent), Southeast Asia (16.4 per cent), South Asia (13.9 per cent).
— PTI
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ICICI Lombard scheme for farmers Chandigarh, August 12 According to Mr K. Bharathan, Regional Director of the company, insurance cover will be available to farmers in the region for any damage to the crops due to excessive or deficient rainfall. This would of course be subject to certain conditions including the type of crop, inputs, irrigation methods, area, topography etc being used by the farmers. In a talk with media persons here today, Mr Bharathan said that the scheme was available in Andhra Pradesh where it had met with some success. Because of scepticism on the part of the farmers, company was using the good offices of NGO's to convince the farmers about the usefulness of the
scheme. It was planned to adopt a similar strategy with regard to Punjab and Haryana. The company could look at the possibility of using the good offices of NGO's like Bharti Kisan Union. Similarly, insurance would be available for variation in power generation at hydro- power projects due to deficient or heavy rainfall in the catchment areas of the power projects. "We are trying to push this scheme in Himachal Pradesh", he said.
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