Welcome to My Blog

Here is a masonry blog layout with no sidebar

Sebi board agrees in principle to ‘controlling shareholders’ concept

The board noted that the investor landscape is now changing, with private equity and institutional investors holding significant shareholding in listed companies. ”In recent years, a number of businesses and new-age companies with diversified shareholding and professional management that are coming into the listed space are non-family owned and/or do not have a distinctly identifiable promoter group,” the board said.

No work, no food: Pandemic deepens global hunger

The World Food Program sounded the alarm further last week in a joint report with the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, warning that “conflict, the economic repercussions of Covid-19 and the climate crisis are expected to drive higher levels of acute food insecurity in 23 hunger hot spots over the next four months,” mostly in Africa but also Central America, Afghanistan and North Korea.

Downbeat Indian consumers withhold spending amid pandemic, says RBI survey

“The sentiments on overall spending remained unchanged as higher spending on essential items were offset by a drop in non-essential expenditure with consumers expecting further contraction in discretionary expenditure in the year ahead,” the RBI said.

With forecasters warning of a third wave, any new restrictions could spell more bad news for the country, where private consumption makes up some 60% of gross domestic product.

J&J seeks emergency use nod for COVID-19 vaccine in India

Indian health authorities have so far approved the use of vaccines developed by AstraZeneca,  Bharat Biotech, Russia’s Gamaleya Institute and Moderna.

The government and Moderna are still trying to sort out issues over imports of the vaccine and indemnity, a top executive at Indian drugmaker and Moderna’s local distribution partner Cipla told Reuters in an interview on Friday.

PSU general insurers’ employees observe strike to protest proposed privatisation

The one-day strike against the passage of the General Insurance Business (Nationalisation) Amendment Bill 2021 in the Lok Sabha was successful across the country, General Insurance Employees All India Association’s General Secretary K Govindan claimed.

About 52,000 employees and officers across all four PSGI companies participated in the day-long strike, he added.

Beazley launches life sciences offering in Asia Pacific

Prashansa Daga, Healthcare Underwriter said: “The life sciences sector across Asia has been growing significantly in recent years and has already overtaken EU in terms of size*. Asia Pacific is now the second largest market in terms of size after the US. Covid-19 has also exposed the need for self-reliance amongst different countries in the region as we saw closing of borders, restriction on movement of pharmaceutical ingredients and the global vaccine scramble. The response to Covid-19 has also fuelled a race to create tests, vaccines and treatments. As an industry driven by intrinsic innovation and inelastic demand for patient needs, life sciences is expected to see significant growth in years to come. Our policy provides clear, broad and flexible cover for a range of risks to help this diverse sector to manage its risk exposures and continue to expand and thrive.”

Moving to cloud can help improve energy efficiency, reduce carbon footprint: Report

In a blog, AWS cited an example that if 25 per cent of the 1,200 largest publicly-traded businesses in India put one megawatt (MW) of compute workload – which is a quarter of an average enterprise IT workload – into a cloud-powered entirely by renewable energy, it would save the equivalent of a year’s worth of emissions from 1,60,000 Indian households.

”Customers in APAC who move compute workloads to the AWS Cloud can significantly reduce their carbon footprint, benefiting from the net effect of all our sustainability efforts,” AWS Head of Energy Policy (the Asia Pacific and Japan) Ken Haig said.

Delta variant now reported in 135 countries, global coronavirus cases could exceed 200 million by next week: WHO

The global number of new cases has been increasing for more than a month, with over 4 million cases reported in the past week – July 26 to August 1, the update said.

“This increasing trend is largely attributed to substantial increases in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Western Pacific Regions which reported 37 percent and 33 percent increases respectively as compared to the previous week, while the South-East Asia Region reported a 9 percent increase,” it said.

Building Climate Resilience in India – Challenges and Opportunities for the BFSI sector

In India, until a few years ago, the topic of climate change and related risks rarely found strong traction in the BFSI sector in India. Till date, most banks and insurers still do not take a sufficiently forward- looking view on climate change and its long-term financial impact. The Financial Stability Board published the second status report on adoption of the recommendations of the Task Force for Climate-related Financial Disclosures on June 5, 2019. The report observed that disclosure of climate-related financial information has increased since 2016, but is still insufficient for investors, especially on the financial impact of climate-related issues on companies

India withdraws controversial retrospective tax bill, to settle tax disputes with global firms

“This decision helps to clarify our position with the investors,” said Tarun Bajaj, revenue secretary at the finance ministry, channel, adding it would help solve pending cases with Cairn Energy and Vodafone if they withdraw litigation and meet certain conditions.
The government’s proposed amendment in the law comes after a French tribunal last month ordered a freeze on some 20 centrally located properties belonging to the Indian government as part of a guarantee of the amount owed to Cairn.

Judge-population ratio stood at 21.03 judges per million people in 2020

The judge-population ratio in 2018 stood at 19.78 judges per million people and 20.39 in 2019, Law Minister Kiren Rijiju told the Upper House in a written reply.

In order to calculate the judge-population ratio for per million population in a particular year, the Department of Justice in the Ministry of Law, uses the population count as per 2011 census and available information regarding sanctioned strength of judges in Supreme Court, high courts, district and subordinate courts, in the particular year, he said.

COVID: why you still need to wash your hands

Many infections begin when we touch our mouth, nose or eyes. Scientists researching this behaviour find that people are constantly touching their faces. Respiratory viruses, such as influenza and SARS-CoV-2, while spread primarily by respiratory droplets can also be spread by contaminated hands touching the mucous membranes of the nose, mouth and eyes.

Resting heart rate is important health indicator

Due to the high pressure, the muscles of the heart get stressed, which can cause all these problems to the patient. One can stabilise a high resting heart rate by improving lifestyle, meditation, and yoga. Moreover, stress is a silent killer that can take your heart rate shooting through the roof. There have also been studies in which patients have normalised their high resting heart rate in just one week with lifestyle modification.