Daily Briefing: India, Australia sign pact to boost bilateral trade; Pakistan Parliament expected to vote on no-confidence motion against PM today

Only in the Express

Hitting out at the Modi government over its “welfarism”, P Chidambaram in an Opinion column writes: “After taxing the poor and the middle-class and collecting humongous amounts, the Central government used that money to provide ‘additional welfare’ to them! The annual outgo on additional Direct Benefit Transfers since 2020 was no more than Rs 2,25,000 crore — which is less than the annual fuel taxes collected by the Centre alone.”

From the Front Page

While Pakistan PM Imran Khan, facing a no-trust vote, has called for his supporters to “protest peacefully”, Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa called for dialogue and diplomacy to resolve all outstanding issues including Kashmir with India. He spoke of his country’s “long and excellent” strategic relationship with the US, whom Khan has blamed both obliquely and directly for his troubles, and hit out at Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.

Nepal PM Sher Bahadur Deuba, on his first bilateral visit abroad since taking charge, said he discussed the “boundary issue” with PM Narendra Modi and “urged” him to resolve it through “bilateral mechanism”. India said the “general understanding” was to address it responsibly and “avoid politicisation”.

Kolkata-based IFB Agro Industries Ltd informed the stock exchanges that its board of directors approved “contributions to political parties by way of subscription to the electoral bonds in one or more tranches aggregating not more than Rs 40 crore for the financial year 2022-23”. It also flagged “excise related issues being faced by/affecting the company”. Earlier, the company had reported an attack on its distillery by over 150 “hooligans”, and sought help from the Chief Minister and Finance Minister of West Bengal.

Must Read

How does “beach” become “bitch”, “buster” turn into “bastard” or “combo” morph into “condom”? Well, it happens when Google Speech-To-Text and Amazon Transcribe, both popular automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, erroneously give such age-inappropriate subtitles on YouTube videos for children. This is the key finding of a study titled ‘Beach to bitch: Inadvertent Unsafe Transcription of Kids Content on YouTube’ which covered 7,013 videos from 24 YouTube channels.

An anti-halal campaign has been going on in Karnataka coinciding with the Kannada New Year of Ugadi, marked by many Hindus eating meat the day after. Hindu right-wing outfits have been urging Hindus to not buy meat from halal shops, with incidents reported of Bajrang Dal men assaulting Muslim shop and restaurant owners. On Saturday, Karnataka’s animal husbandry department said that it has received complaints that animals were not being stunned before slaughter, which was in violation of rules. Traders in the state fear that the circular could be used to harass them.

He is an oligarch, the Chelsea Football Club owner and among the richest Russians, with over USD 8 billion in personal wealth. So what does he have to do with the war in Ukraine? While Roman Abramovich’s role in the Russia-Ukraine negotiations has not been officially clarified, the speculation in Ukraine and the rest of Europe is that it’s a bid by the billionaire to save his assets scattered across the world.

The Delhi government has announced that it is setting up boarding schools for children from homeless families. But for one 13-year-old selling head-scratchers at Connaught Place, life has taught him to be sceptical about such promises. “People have asked me about it. Somebody came and took my father’s number too. But they never called,” he explains. He has never been to school and says he doesn’t see himself ever going to one. “I have three sisters and a brother. My elder sister and I must earn, and maybe our younger siblings can go to school,” he says. “I will do this for the rest of my life.”

And Finally…

When Veenapani Chawala set up Adishakti Theatre Arts, an institution of performing arts near Puducherry, she wanted to establish a form of theatre whose sole purpose was not to entertain or inform but to understand the psychic or the “space for luminous creativity” in every person. Chawla’s intense legacy attracts new generations of theatre-makers till today. Adishakti — the name means primal female energy — is celebrating its 40th anniversary from April 5, with a festival, titled “Remembering Veenapani 2022”.

Until tomorrow,
Sonal Gupta and Rahel Philipose