22 December 2013

Ø  Union Environment Minister Jayanthi Natarajan has stolen a march on her colleagues by resigning from the Council of Ministers, offering to work in the party organisation. Petroleum Minister M. Veerappa Moily has been asked to hold additional charge of the Environment Ministry.  The last occasion Ministers quit to work for the party was in mid-June, when Ajay Maken and C.P. Joshi — now general secretaries — left the Cabinet.  Senior functionaries said the party leadership would prefer Ministers who are Rajya Sabha members to quit to work for the party, as they would not be pre-occupied with their own elections.

Ø   Additional District and Sessions Judge B.K. Naik awarded death sentence to K. Mohan Kumar on finding him guilty of murdering three women by administering cyanide. Prosecution has alleged that these three women are among the 20 killed by Mohan.

Ø  Hyderabad-born attorney Nandita Venkateswaran Berry has been appointed Secretary of State for Texas, making her the first person of Indian origin to hold the third top executive job in the southern State.

Ø  The Hague-based International Court of Arbitration has allowed India to go ahead with construction of the 330-MW Kishenganga hydro-electric project in North Kashmir which was in dispute with Pakistan. In its final order delivered on Friday, the court upheld India’s right under the bilateral Indus Waters Treaty to divert waters from the Kishenganga for power generation in Jammu and Kashmir. The court, however, decided that India release a minimum flow of nine cubic metres per second (cumecs) into the Kishenganga river (known as Neelam in Pakistan) downstream of the project at all times to maintain environmental flows. On India seeking a clarification on the drawdown flushing technique for clearing sedimentation in the run-of-the river project, it is understood that the country may have to adopt a different technique for flushing in future projects. The Rs. 3600-crore project is designed to generate power by diverting water from a dam site on the Kishenganga to the Bonar Nallah, another tributary of the Jhelum, through tunnels.

Ø  Gazprom became the first company in the world to launch commercial production of oil from under the Arctic waters. Russia’s natural gas monopoly Gazprom said on Friday it had begun pumping oil at its first Arctic offshore platform at the Prirazlomnoye field in the Pechora Sea.

Ø  Recent satellite imagery appears to have “clearly” revealed that Pakistan has completed the external construction of its fourth reactor building at the Khushab nuclear site, 200 km south of Islamabad, a think-tank here has reported.  The Khushab site is dedicated to the production of plutonium for nuclear weapons, ISIS noted, and originally it consisted of a heavy water production plant and a heavy water reactor, both of which became operational in the 1990s.

Ø  Net direct tax collections from April to 20 December were up 13.7 per cent at Rs.4.13 lakh crore, according to an official release.  The government had fixed direct tax collection target of over Rs.6.68 lakh crore in the Union Budget for 2013-14, envisaging a growth of 19 per cent over the collections in 2012-13. The slower-than-target growth will make Finance Minister P. Chidambaram’s task of keeping the fiscal deficit, or the excess of the government’s spending over its revenues, within the target of 4.8 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) tougher.

Ø  Chairman of Xpro India Ltd. Sidharth Birla, on Saturday, took over as the President of FICCI 

Ø  India’s foreign exchange (forex) reserves decreased by $192.8 million to $295.51 billion for the week ended December 13. The reserves had soared by $4.40 billion to $295.70 billion in the week ended December 6.