Pak alleges India violating Indus Waters Treaty; protests to World Bank

A Pakistani delegation raised the issue of India's alleged violation of the Indus Waters Treaty with the World Bank which discussed opportunities within the treaty to seek an amicable resolution, officials said on Tuesday.

Yesterday's meeting took place days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the 330 MW Kishanganga hydroelectric project in Jammu and Kashmir, amid protests from Pakistan which claims that the project on a river flowing into Pakistan will disrupt water supplies.

Pakistan's Foreign Office had, on Friday, voiced concern over the inauguration of the hydroelectric project, saying inauguration without resolution of dispute between the two countries will tantamount to violation of the Indus Waters 1960 that regulates the use of waters in the shared rivers.

Higher tariffs could harm market sentiment, disrupt supply chains: IMF

The International Monetary Fund warned on Tuesday that rising US-China trade restrictions threaten to damage a steady global growth picture, but there was still time for the world's two largest economies to step back from the brink.

The IMF, in its latest World Economic Outlook, kept its global growth forecasts for both 2018 and 2019 unchanged at 3.9 per cent after upgrades in January that were partly based on expectations of stronger US spending spurred by tax cuts.

But IMF chief economist Maurice Obstfeld said those effects will fade quickly, causing growth to slow in subsequent years.

"The prospect of trade restrictions and counter-restrictions threatens to undermine confidence and derail growth prematurely," Obstfeld told a news conference ahead of the IMF and World Bank spring meetings this week, where trade is expected to dominate discussions.

Asked if a trade war was under way, Obstfeld said the United States and China had fired "some warning shots" on tariff plans but had not activated them

Will India's rank change? WB to recalculate ease of doing business rankings

Giving credence to the theory that the World Bank's popular ease of doing business (EODB) ranking is not credible and accurate, its chief economist Paul Romer has announced to recalculate the national rankings of business competitiveness going back to at least four years.

The announcement, which has raised several questions on the authenticity of the EODB report, was made by Romer in an interview to The Wall Street Journal in which he made a personal apology to Chile, the ranking of which has come down from 34th in 2014 to 57th in 2017.
"I want to make a personal apology to Chile, and to any other country where we conveyed the wrong impression," Romer told The Wall Street Journal.

Romer's statement that the national ranking of ease of doing business would be carried for last four years, could have a notable impact on India as its ranking jumped from 140 in 2014 to 100 in 2018.

The problems with the report, he said, were "my fault because we did not make things clear enough."
According to the daily, Romer said the World Bank is "beginning the process of correcting the past reports and republishing what the rankings would have been without the methodology changes".
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News digest: IDFC Bank-Capital First merger, SC crisis, World Bank and more

IDFC Bank to merge with Capital First, Vaidyanathan to succeed Lall
India’s newest scheduled commercial lender IDFC Bank and Warburg Pincus-backed Capital First on Saturday agreed to merge in an all-share deal. V Vaidyanathan, chairman of the non-banking finance company, would become the MD and CEO of the merged entity, succeeding Rajiv Lall. (Full report)
Managing the SC crisis: Bar Council forms team; Congress takes on Modi

The Bar Council of India has set up a seven-member team in an attempt to resolve the differences between the four dissenting Supreme Court judges and Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dipak Misra. The team is expected to start its deliberations with all judges, except the top five, immediately.

The Supreme Court Bar Association also passed a resolution on Saturday that the rift should be considered by a full bench of the apex court. It also said that the CJI or senior judges should look at all public interest litigations.

Rising corporate bond yields may send India Inc to banks for loans
With bond yields rising, it seems companies may find it more profitable to go back to banks for loans, rather than coming to the bond market. This will partially break the emerging trend of ‘disintermediation’, or companies diversifying away from bank credit to other sources of funds, which started about two years back as banks refused to lower their lending rates, while the fixed income market incorporated every cut done by the central bank. (Read more)
How World Bank unfairly influenced its own competitiveness rankings
The World Bank repeatedly changed the methodology of one of its flagship economic reports over several years in ways it now says were unfair and misleading. The World Bank’s chief economist, Paul Romer, told The Wall Street Journal on Friday he would correct and recalculate national rankings of business competitiveness in the report called “Doing Business” going back at least four years.

World Bank gives Aadhaar thumbs up; wants other nations to adopt it too

As the government is in the process of linking Aadhaar cards with an array of schemes and programmes amid criticism, the system has been lauded by World Bank chief economist Paul Romer. He feels that other nations should also adopt this system.

"The Aadhaar system is the most sophisticated identification programme in the world," said Romer in an interview with Bloomberg. 

Romer asserted that it is best to develop one standardised system so people can carry their IDs wherever they go in the world.

"It’s the basis for all kinds of connections that involve things like financial transactions. It could be good for the world if this became widely adopted," Romer said. 

Interestingly, countries like Tanzania, Afghanistan and Bangladesh have shown interest in the Aadhaar system and visited India, Nandan Nilekani, former chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), who created Aadhaar said. 

In 2016, RS Sharma, chairman of Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) told Mint that Russia, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia have also shown interest in Aadhaar. 

However, many critics suggest that Aadhaar could put privacy at stake. In 2013, a group of petitioners, including a retired judge of the Karnataka High Court, approached the Supreme Court saying that the Aadhaar scheme is an “infringement” on the right of privacy of citizens.

In countries like UK, France and USA similar plans are widely debated. In 2010, UK announced that it was scrapping a plan for a national identity register after objections that it infringed on civil liberties, but it continues to issue biometric residence permits for foreigners. In France a mega database for biometric details of citizens is under the scanner. In US, identity theft complaints were the second-most reported in 2015, Federal Trade Commission said. 

Romer rubbished such concerns saying, "It should be part of the policy of the government to give individuals some control over the data that the private firms collect and some control over how that data is used." (READ MORE)