Prashant Mavani, is an expert in current affairs analysis and holds a MSc in Management from University of Surrey (U.K.). Above all he is a passionate teacher.

• Trump’s policy announcement on Afghanistan

• India’s plans to expand its security assistance to Afghanistan by training police officers in India as part of a UNDP project.• Message: a continued commitment to Afghan stability.• The country saw the highest civilian casualties last year since the 2001 U.S.-led

invasion.• Casualties are coming not from Afghanistan’s border areas but its cities and villages.

• Only a professionally trained police force can maintain peace in civilian area.

• India has also announced this month 116 smaller “new development projects” across Afghanistan, and police forces will be crucial in protecting irrigation, housing and school projects from the Taliban and other terror groups.

• The second message, to Pakistan.• Indian engineers to refurbish several non-functional Soviet-era planes and to repair

the helicopters India donated to Afghanistan last year.

• a message to the U.S. and NATO forces

• India will play a part in putting Afghanistan back on its feet in India’s own way.

• India-Afghanistan trade fair sponsored by USAID• United States Agency for International Development

• India-Afghanistan-Iran trilateral arrangement to circumvent the obstacles is on track was well-timed.

• The commitment that the Chabahar port development project will be completed next year.

• a sustainable trade route from South Asia to Central Asia

• Set of weak economic numbersa. expansion in gross domestic product slowed to a multi-year low of 5.7% in the first quarter of 2017-18

b. industrial output growth dropped to 1.2% in July, compared to 4.5% a year earlier

c. retail price inflation jumped to a five-month high of 3.36% in August from 2.36% in July

• There is, however, talk that increased fiscal spending to the tune of ₨50,000 crore or more may be approved by the government to make up for lack of private investment.

• Point C: further dimming the prospects of a monetary stimulus from the Reserve Bank of India to help boost the economy.• Formulates, implements and monitors the monetary policy for

a) maintaining price stability, keeping inflation in check

b) ensuring adequate flow of credit to productive sectors

• Increased fiscal spending is unlikely to provide more than short-term relief to this problem.

• Will it address production bottlenecks?

Investments

New Business Opportunities

News Jobs

More consumption

More revenue in hands of

Government

Government investment

e.g. infrastructure

• The real antidote to the current slowdown, on the other hand, is known all too well.• Land• Labour• Unease involved in doing business in the country

• Stopping investors from risking their capital on large-scale projects needed to boost growth.

• But successive governments have found it easier to kick the can down the road rather than enact politically uneasy reforms needed to address the problem facing the economy.

• A city is more than a place to live, it embodies a dream and the possibilities of a dream.

• Yet if one city showed hope in India, expressed its cosmopolitan dreams and its intellectual inventiveness, it was Bangalore.• the myth of Bangalore as the cutting edge Indian city is dying

Back to Visvesvaraya• Modern Bangalore as a creation myth goes back to the iconicity of one man, the

dewan of development, the patriarch of Indian planning, M. Visvesvaraya.• He conveyed a sense of hybridity

• “industrialise and perish” Gandhiji• “industrialise or perish” Visvesvaraysji

• Visvesvaraya was one of the great icons• Modernity• Style• Krishna Raja Sagara Lake and dam in 1924• GoIndia sent him to the city of Aden to study

• water supply and drainage system in 1906-07

• Bangalore was modern, hopeful, liveable, scientific, local, cosmopolitan, a retired person’s dream and a professional’s first choice.

• IT added to the lustre and created the myth of Bangalore as India’s Silicon Valley.

Onward to IT

• The technocrat, the manager and the entrepreneur were edging out a more cosmopolitan world of science.

• Earlier, the pursuit of science was seen as a public good, an attempt to create a public culture. Today scientific research without a technological catchment was seen as unproductive.

Civic issues, civil society

• The Karnataka of today is becoming more local and parochial in its manifestations. There is a desperate need for rethinking the imagination of Bangalore as a city.

• The imagination of the city as diverse, open, wise to the ways of the world needs to be reworked and mere technocratic projects cannot be the quick fix for the problem.

• Muhammad Yunus launched Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, which made capital available to the poor, especially women.

• Yunus, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.

• Failures can be corrected if human beings choose to replace that economic system with a new system that more accurately reflects human nature, human needs, and human desires.

• The central problem with capitalism as it is now practised is that the system recognises only one goal — the selfish pursuit of individual profit.

• Results: poverty, unemployment, and environmental degradation

• If we simply begin designing businesses with these goals in mind, then social business can play a crucial role.• Social business offers advantages that are available neither to profit-maximising

companies nor to traditional charities.

• Since electronic technologies for information and communication can play a huge role in amplifying the power of individual entrepreneurs.

• Health care, education, marketing, financial services, and many other economic arenas can be revolutionised through the combined power of social business and technology.

• We owe it to future generations to begin moving towards a world of three zeros: zero poverty, zero unemployment, and zero net carbon emissions.

Crisis of capitalism

• Humankind as a whole is living in a time of unparalleled prosperity, fuelled in part by revolutions in knowledge.• 4 billion people

• Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)

• Sadly, however, 2008 will go down in history as the year of a rude awakening about the gross weaknesses in our capitalist system. It was the year of the food price crisis, the oil price crisis, the financial crisis, and the ever-worsening environmental crisis.

• Early in 2008, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) reported dreadful news: more than 73 million people in 78 countries were facing the reality of reduced food rations.

• high food prices have created tremendous pressure in the lives of poor people, for whom basic food can consume as much as two-thirds of their income.

• Thus, solving the global food problem will require a redesign of the international framework, not merely a series of local or even regional reforms.

TRIFED

• Govt. of India has initiated a number of steps to develop socio economic conditions of tribal population in the country and one of those initiatives, is the formation of Tribal Cooperative Marketing Development Federation of India Limited (TRIFED) in 1987.

• It is a national-level apex organization functioning under the administrative control of Ministry of Tribal Affairs, Govt. of India.

• TRIFED has a network of its (Member Federations) and (13 offices) all over India with its headquarters in New Delhi.

Private players may run rail lines

• Union government is open to the idea of giving operations of railway lines to private players for enhancing competition.• E.g. Telecommunication

• Competition is better for consumers

• Piyush Goel said that he is studying various models to for attracting more private players.

• There can be no limit of money when it comes to safety. GoI is ready to spend.

Kept politics out of broadcast, says PM• Prime Minister Narendra Modi today said, cleanliness has become a mass movement as everyone has become

part of the campaign. • Sankalp Se Siddhi: 75 lakh people joined the drive with over 40,000 initiatives. • More than 2 crore 50 lakh children took part in essay competition on cleanliness and thousands of students made paintings

based on their own imagination.• Speaking about a young man from Srinagar, Bilal Dar, who clears more than 12,000 kilos of garbage annually, Mr Modi

expressed happiness that by setting a new trend, Srinagar municipal corporation has made him a Brand Ambassador. Dar has been engaged in cleanliness for the last 5 to 6 years since the age of 12.

• The Prime Minister said, on the occasion of the birth anniversary of Sardar Patel on 31st October, Run for Unity will be held. He said, it should be organized in every city and town on a very large scale to promote the mantra of unity.

• The Prime Minister urged people to enlist seven best tourist destinations of their states and if possible they must visit the places. He said, there will be a value addition in tourism only if people travel not only as visitors but also like a student making efforts to assimilate, understand and internalize diversities of millions of denizens of India to enrich their lives.

• The Prime Minister recalled the great men of India - Mahatma Gandhi, Sardar Patel, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Jaiprakash Narayan, Nanaji Deshmukh and Deen Dayal Upadhayay who he said gave the country a new direction. He said they remained far away from corridors of power but lived every moment for people.

• Mr Modi said, people's interest has increased in Khadi after it was discussed in one of the previous episodes of Mann Ki Baat. He said, sale of khadi has increased and a poor man's household has directly got connected to employment.

• Speaking on Mann Ki Baat programme, which completed three years today, Mr Modi said, it gave him a unique opportunity to get connected with various feelings and positive energy of the country.

Storms leave Caribbean tourism industry in jitters

• Two ferocious hurricanes in less than two weeks caused widespread devastation in the Caribbean this month, leaving dozens dead, millions without power or drinking water and countless homes destroyed.

• The storms also ripped through the tourism industry in a region unusually dependent on well-heeled visitors, where a thriving network of hotels, souvenir shops, taxis, charter fishing boats and restaurants powers local economies.

• Right now, the livelihood of tourism on a whole is in a coma

Merkel wins 4th term as Chancellor

• German Chancellor Angela Merkel won a fourth term in

office on Sunday but will have to build an uneasy coalition to

form a German government after her conservatives

haemorrhaged support in the face of a surge by the far-right.

• The election was fought on the tense backdrop of surging support for far-left and far-right parties across Europe. Germany in particular is coping with the arrival of more than one million refugees and other new migrants, with tension with Russia since Moscow’s incursions into Ukraine, and with doubt about Europe’s future since Britain voted to quit the EU.

Questions

1. In political science what do you understand by the concept of Subsidiarity?

2. What is difference between GST Council and GST Network? (In 2 lines i.e. one line for each item)

3. The earth is already about _____° C warmer than average pre-industrial temperatures.

The End

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