Agrihub to provide one-stop solution to farmers
The Agrihub, a digital platform floated by two mechanical engineers will provide one-stop solution for farmers about products and technologies.
The Bengaluru-based portal will connect seed providers, agriculture equipment providers, retailers and distributors. It will also help the stakeholders to track innovations or products, find suppliers and facilitate and educate to make rapid purchase decisions.
Rajeeb Roy co-founded the firm along with another Mechanical Engineer Abhishek Bhatt and Sidharth Kumar in Bengaluru.
“While the urban trader has access to new products and technology it is difficult for those from remote towns to know about them. At best they can know about it through extensive visits to exhibitions. Businesses and small companies spend thousands of dollars to showcase their existing products and launch new products in exhibitions. The duration of these exhibitions is for about three to four days and the footfall is usually more of casual visitors. Agrihub has been started to address these issues,” Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Roy said.
Over 3,600 farmers and well-known brands such as John Deere, Yara Fertilizers, Rallis, Namdhari Seeds, Tafe, KF Bioplants, New Holland Agriculture, Known Your Seed, Ginegar and Nagarjuna have already been listed on the platform.
The product category offered by the company includes: seeds and plants; irrigation products; fertilizers and plant protection products; farm tools and equipment and hi-tech agriculture and allied products.
Indian economy poised to grow 7.3 % in 2016: U.N. report
Notwithstanding delays in domestic policy reforms, India’s economy “is slowly gaining momentum” and “is projected to grow by 7.3 per cent this year,” a United Nations report forecast on Thursday.
The World Economic Situation and Prospect report, in its mid-2016 update, has said India is expected to achieve a 7.5 per cent GDP growth in 2017 and the economic prospects of the South Asian region will be “contingent” on the growth trajectory of India and Iran.
Economy slowly gaining tempo
“India’s economy is slowly gaining momentum, with an expected GDP growth of 7.3 and 7.5 per cent in 2016 and 2017, respectively.
“Despite some delays in domestic policy reforms and enduring fragilities in the banking system, investment demand is supported by the monetary easing cycle, rising FDI, and government efforts towards infrastructure investments and public-private partnerships,” the report, released here said.
Bad news for China
China, which grew at about 6.9 per cent in 2015, will continue to witness slowdown in growth, with its GDP projected to grow 6.4 per cent in 2016 and 6.5 per cent in 2017.
“A larger-than-expected slowdown in China would have widespread spill-over effects through trade, financial and commodity markets, while a further deterioration of commodity prices could trigger debt crises in certain commodity-dependent economies,” said the report, produced jointly by the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) and the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).
In line with January projections
India’s economy, which accounts for over 70 per cent of South Asia’s GDP, had grown by about 7.2 per cent in 2015.
Oil does the trick for South Asia
The report added that despite the protracted instabilities and general weakness of the global economy, South Asia’s economic outlook remains favourable, with most countries benefiting from low oil prices.
Regional GDP growth is expected to accelerate from 6.1 per cent in 2015 to 6.6 this year and 6.8 per cent in 2017, owing to robust private consumption, strengthening investment demand and gradual progress on domestic policy reforms.
Relatively tame inflation
Inflation in the South Asian region is projected to remain relatively tame, reflecting subdued commodity prices and lower pressures from supply-side bottlenecks.
Indirect tax collections rise 42 % in April
Indirect tax collections for April 2016 grew 42 per cent over their level in April 2015.April’s collections amount to 8.3 per cent of the Budget Estimates for the financial year.
Central excise collections saw a 71 per cent increase in April 2016, coming in at Rs. 28,252 crore compared to the Rs. 16,546 crore in April 2015.
The growth in total indirect tax collections were mainly driven by the growth in excise collections due to several additional revenue generating measures taken by the government over the last year such as increasing the excise duty on petrol, diesel, and tobacco.
Excluding such measures, the growth in total indirect tax collections stood at 17 per cent, according to the government.
Service tax collections amounted to Rs. 18,647 crore in April 2016 compared to Rs. 14,585 crore during the same period of the previous year, a growth of 27.9 per cent.The third category of indirect tax collections, customs duty collections, came in at Rs. 17,495 crore in April 2016, up 22.5 per cent from the Rs. 14,286 crore seen in April 2015.
This data comes at a time when the government announced on Tuesday that it has unearthed approximately Rs. 50,000 crore of indirect taxes evasion and undisclosed income of Rs. 21,000 crore over the last two years.
WHO clears air: Delhi no longer most polluted, that’s Zabol in Iran
Glow-In-The-Dark Cement Could Save Electricity
Researcher José Carlos Rubio needed to check whether he could make sense of an approach to light up expressways and streets around evening time – without utilizing power.
Rubio soon found a genuinely creative arrangement; he found that by modifying the fine structure of cement in some ways, he could come up with a variety that seemed to glow in the dark.
As per Rubio, the light-transmitting item could keep going for a long time and give light to around 12 hours during the evening. The force of light radiated can be changed so it doesn’t overpower drivers or cyclists. The light gleams as a cool green or blue.
The cement would spare a lot of power, as well as the procedure to make it is naturally neighborly too. Amid assembling, the main thing discharged is water vapor.
There are a wide assortment of business applications; as indicated by Rubio, four billion tons of cement were made all through the world in 2015, and the sparkling cement can be put to use for roads as well as structures too. The innovation could even be utilized as a part of plaster. As per the journal Investigacion ,Desarrollo, Rubio’s examination has achieved the commercialization stage.
Domestic violence Act misused: Centre
The government recently told the Rajya Sabha that provisions of the Domestic Violence and Anti-Dowry Acts are being misused and several NGOs had also given reports supporting it.
Records show that only 13 persons were convicted out of the 639 charge sheeted in 2014 under the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act 2005. Many fake cases are being registered under the act and there the Act is also being misused.
Way Forward:
Even while admitting that misuse does happen, the government has made it clear that it’s focus is on women safety and any dilution to it could not be allowed.Legal experts say that there have to be checks and balances.
Eradicating these acts is not the solution as there are still several genuine cases and such women need protection. There ought to be a better mechanism to deal with such cases. Instead of immediately arresting people upon a complaint, the police should first probe before taking action.
The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act 2005 was enacted to protect women from domestic violence.
- It is a civil law meant primarily for protection orders and not meant to penalize criminally.The Act provides for the first time in Indian law a definition of “domestic violence”, with this definition being broad and including not only physical violence, but also other forms of violence such as emotional/verbal, sexual, and economic abuse.
- The act does not extend to Jammu and Kashmir, which has its own laws, and which enacted in 2010 the Jammu and Kashmir Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2010.
Few Facts :-
- 266% Growth in Tourists arrival on E-Tourist Visa in April 2016 over the same period in 2015.
- World’s biggest plane, the Antonov An-225, destined for Perth, takes off from Prague.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.