PM to thrash out blue print for economic revival
New Delhi-- Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee has convened a series of meetings between various ministries in September as concerns mount over the state of the economy and to thrash out a revival blueprint.

While the first meeting on September 4 will be attended by all economic ministries, two more meetingsof the two advisory councils on trade and industry and the economywill be held on September 7 and 10 respectively.

The closed-door meetings are also expected to be attended by the Reserve Bank of India governor Bimal Jalan are likely to result in formulation of a fiscal stimulus package.

Official sources said the package could include a substantial increase in public investment and measures to improve liquidity and remove bottlenecks in government expenditure.

The Ministry of Finance, Commerce, and the Reserve Bank of India will prepare reports and slides, which will be discussed thoroughly at the meetings.

The meetings will also discuss the problem of the low rate of realisation of FDI and the crisis in investment.

Highly placed sources say that politically, the Prime Minister is conscious that constituents of the NDA are doing their best to get the economy going again but that there is a feeling of drift.

These meetings will put an end to that and will infuse energy into the government.
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Convergence Bill not to regulate Net
New DelhiThough the Communication Convergence Bill 2001, may have provided for content regulation, but, thankfully, the content panel will not exercise control over the Internet.
That is if the Bill approved by the cabinet yesterday is passed by parliament in its present form. Though Internet services and unified messaging services would be licensed activities, IT-enabled services will not be licensed under this Act.
Top sources said the proposed content panel could only monitor content provided by licence-holders of content application services.
Content application services include satellite broadcasting, subscription broadcasting, terrestrial free-to-air TV broadcasting and terrestrial radio broadcasting.
The earlier draft Bill had made room for four categories of licences: network infrastructure facilities (like earth stations and cable infrastructure), networking services (bandwidth, and fixed and mobile links) and network application services (PSTN telephony, public cellular telephony, IP telephony and radio paging services).
Now, a fifth has been added called value-added network application services, which includes Internet services and unified messaging services.
The Bill has further clarified that IT-enabled services like call centres, e-commerce, tele-banking, tele-education, tele-trading, tele-banking, tele-medicine, video text and video conference have not been included for licence in the proposed Act.
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Co-ops may get approval to foray into insurance biz
Mumbai The recently introduced Insurance Amendments Bill 2001 has proposed that co-operative societies be allowed to enter the insurance business and may even offer 26 per cent equity to foreigners.
The new Bill suggests that individuals can come together to form an insurance venture under a co-operative society, and not necessarily form a joint stock company.
Besides this, insurance brokerage firms will also be allowed foreign participation up to 26 per cent of their paid up capital and insurance companies will be allowed to pay up to 30 per cent commission to them.
A significant allowance made to life insurers is allowing them to distribute to shareholders 10 per cent of the surplus on the valuation of life insurance funds.
At present, of its annual valuation surplus, the LIC pays a dividend of only five percent to the government and distributes and the rest among policy-holders in the form of bonus.
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New transfer pricing norms to yield Rs 500cr
MumbaiThe new transfer pricing rules are expected to contribute at least an additional Rs 500 crore from multinationals by way of corporate tax, in the next fiscal.
It is not yet clear, however, how MNCs operating in India would react to Indias transfer pricing rules. Analysts say, some export operations set up by MNCs in India, especially I-T start ups, are pondering seriously over shifting their Indian operations to neighbouring countries, like Malaysia, Bangladesh and Philippines because these countries do not yet have a transfer-pricing regime.
Since a company needs to comply with the transfer pricing rules, those who operate on the fringe would consider it an additional burden, as it involves paying more taxes.
Transfer pricing is a practice followed by multinationals which have subsidiaries in many countries in which prices can be manipulated keeping in mind taxation rates in different different. Transfer pricing can be used show higher profits in low tax countries.
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Railtel to invite tenders for optical fibre backbone
New Delhi-- Railtel Corporation of India Ltd is inviting tenders from private companies to execute about 2000 km of OFC network in different sections of the country. Thus, interested parties will be asked to submit their bids for different sections separately and execute the project on a turnkey basis. The selected bidders would get six to nine months to complete laying of the OFC, a senior Railway official said.

Railtel, the broadband subsidiary of the Railways, would shortly come up with advertisements announcing the tenders.
The sections for which the corporation is inviting tenders include Pune-Vadi-Guntakal-Dharmavaram (900 km), Vadi-Hyderabad-Vijaywada via Guntur (400 km) and Delhi-Jaipur (300 km).

The private parties which bag the contract would procure the OFC and also lay it along the railway tracks in these sectors in a turn-key basis and the total expenditure on the four sections would be in the range of Rs 65-80 crore.

Railtel has recently tied up a soft loan Rs 200 crore loan from Indian Railway Finance Corporation (IRFC) and is in talks with other financial institutions to raise another Rs 450-500 crore.
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