15 DECEMBER 2015

Ø  Rejecting criticism over the sudden resumption of India-Pakistan talks, Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has said that there was no “secrecy” in his meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and in the NSA talks in Bangkok. Speaking exclusively to The Hindu on the sidelines of the groundbreaking ceremony for the TAPI pipeline project in Turkmenistan, Mr. Sharif said the process needed “time and patience.”

Ø  The groundbreaking ceremony of the TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) project provided yet another multilateral setting for a meeting between the Indian and Pakistani leadership this week, as Pakistan Prime Minister Nawa Sharif and Indian Vice-President Hamid Ansari met along with Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani and Turkmenistan President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov to press a button that forged the first piece of the pipeline. Speaking to reporters on board his plane as he returned from the Turkmenistan town of Mary where the gas pipeline will originate, Mr. Ansari said his meeting with Mr. Sharif had been “very cordial.” Earlier, the Afghanistan President said TAPI would become a “superhighway of cooperation” between all the member-countries. According to an agreement between the four countries, a fibre-optic cable as well as electricity transmission lines would also be laid along the 1,735 km route of the pipeline. When completed, TAPI will supply crucial energy to bridge Pakistan’s energy deficit, as well as provide India between 15-25% of its natural gas needs. In addition, experts said the commercial partnership between the two countries, with India paying Pakistan transit fees, could give other projects like the pipeline from Iran (IPI) higher chances of success, as long as the security of the project was guaranteed. Meanwhile, a spat over a possible Taliban threat to the TAPI broke out between the Pakistan and Afghanistan governments, after Pakistan Defence Minister Khwaja Asif was quoted as saying that Pakistan could “reach out” to the Afghan Taliban to ensure the pipeline’s security. In response, the Afghan defence spokesperson said, “If Pakistan can ask Taliban not to attack TAPI, we would repeat our demands to help end the war in Afghanistan too.”

Ø  The retirement savings managed and overseen by the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) are set to cross the Rs.10 lakh- crore mark this month, making it the eleventh largest pension fund in the world. With savings of over 8.5 crore employees in the formal sector from 6.32 lakh establishments, the EPFO is already India’s second largest non-banking financial institution with only Life Insurance Corporation of India having a bigger kitty. By December-end, the assets under EPFO’s regulation would cross Rs.10 lakh crore. This include Rs. 7 lakh crore remitted to the PF department and managed by our fund managers and Rs. 3 lakh crore managed by the company-run self-managed PF trusts that we regulate. Globally, pension funds are one of the largest pools of capital with a long-term horizon for investments. The 300 largest pension funds in the world together had over 15 trillion dollars under management in 2014, rising by 3 per cent from a year ago, according to a recent report by Towers Watson, a consulting firm. The higher growth rate of the EPF corpus, compared with its peers in the developed world that is going through a prolonged economic slow-down, is likely to push it into the top 10 pension funds of the world in the coming years. After years of resistance, EPFO started investing in equities this year. It has already invested over Rs. 3,200 crore in the stock market. Last month, the EPFO altered the norms that prevented it from investing in debt rated lower than AAA, and it can now invest in the private sector debt rated AA+ by at least two credit rating agencies. However, infrastructure investments rarely secure such ratings.