State depts oppose move to centralize drug mfg licensing

Mint reports

The Union government’s proposal to create a Central Drugs Authority that will regulate and monitor the functioning of pharmaceutical companies has run into opposition from the drug departments of state governments, which believe the move will limit their own role.
The government’s move to create CDA—modelled on the Food and Drugs Administration of the US—will expand the powers of the current pharmaceuticals regulator, Drug Controller General of India or DCGI, and set up departments to monitor clinical trials, medical devices, vaccine and other drugs-related businesses. The CDA, awaiting parliamentary nod, will function under the ministry of health and family welfare.

These bureaucrats!

Indian planters urge Thai FTA plan rethink

Mint reports

Fears of concessional import of natural rubber from Thailand under the proposed free trade agreement (FTA) has caused a flutter in the rubber sector with growers and traders requesting the Centre to desist from any such move.

United Planters Association of South India (Upasi) president J.K. Thomas has, in a representation to the government, requested it to reconsider the move to allow cheap import of rubber from Thailand.

Thomas said he feared that the agreement would mean delisting rubber from the sensitive list which would bring down the present import tariff from 20% to 5%.
Indian Rubber Dealers’ Federation vice-president N. Radhakrishnan noted that Thailand is the largest natural rubber producer with an annual production of around 32 lakh tonnes. Both groups claim that the move would seriously affect the livelihood of small and marginal growers who account for 90% of the more than one million growers producing 8.03 lakh tonne of rubber annually.

Brass parts makers strike metal

FE reports

Nearly 3,000 brass part units in Jamnagar, Gujarat, will go on a symbolic one-day strike to protest the substantial surge in the prices of brass scrap, a key raw material used by the industry. Both at the London Metal Exchange (LME) and domestic commodity exchanges, the prices of brass parts have been constantly rising for the past four months.

Attributing speculative trading as the reason for the rise, brass parts manufacturers said that the prices of brass scrap have increased to Rs 270 per kg, from Rs 215 - Rs. 230 four months ago. Surprisingly, the prices were as low as Rs 80 - Rs 100 two years ago.

Govt mails bad news

FE reports

The government wants to reserve the right to carry letters, book post and parcels weighing up to 150 gm for its postal department. Private courier operators may be allowed to service this sector, but they will have to charge five times the postal department’s tariff for the same articles.

In a cabinet note on the proposed Indian Post Office (Amendment) Bill, 2007, the department of posts in the ministry of communications & IT has also said that in the case of urgent or exclusive mail services, courier companies will have to charge 2.5 times the Speedpost or Express Mail Services rates.

Export tax to conserve raw materials

PTI reports

Amid a threat of Chinese boycott of Indian iron ore due to the imposition of a Rs300-per-tonne duty on Indian ore exports, Finance Minister P Chidambaram on 29 March defended the measure saying it will “conserve” the country’s raw materials for domestic steel units.

“There is no controversy. As I said in my budget speech, it (the tax) is intended to conserve raw materials for our own steel industry and at the same time, create some revenues taking note of the fact that the prices are ruling very high,” Chidambaram said here after inaugurating the full-fledged branch of Bank of India, where the Communist giant initiated the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) for the first time.

If this is an argument, where is the end?

Govt plans Rs 550cr ad blitz for flagship progs

BS reports

There may be two years left for the general elections but the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government is already planning a Rs 550-crore print advertising blitz for its flagship programmes like Bharat Nirman, Sarva Shikhsha Abhiyan and Prarambhik Shikhsha Kosh for this financial year.

This budget is more than five times the Rs 100 crore the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government spent on its 2004 “India Shining” campaign and accounts for about 8 per cent of the total advertising spend by the corporate sector on the print media last year.

The publicity campaign will be created by the Directorate of Advertising & Visual Publicity (DAVP) under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (I&B).

Ads? For whom? Why? To win elections? To replace reality with images?

Reminds me of a passage from Milan Kundera's Immortality.

Communists used to believe that in the course of capitalist development the proletariat would gradually grow poorer and poorer, but when it finally became clear that all over Europe workers were driving to work in their own cars, they felt like shouting that reality was deceiving them. Reality was stronger than ideology. And it is in this sense that imagology surpassed it: imagology is stronger than reality.

Government, private firms and wheat

BS writes in an edit

The large corporations who are participants in the wheat trade have been informally requested by the Central government to not buy wheat from Punjab and Haryana. The context is that last year, firms like Cargill and ITC had bought up roughly 1.3 million tonnes, or 17 per cent, of Punjabs wheat output, by paying Rs 20 per quintal more than the price offered by the government. The legitimacy of the governments request is suspect, and various industries (cement, steel) have demonstrated in recent weeks that they are not about to panic because the government frowns on their pricing or other decisions. Everyone knows that the government has the power to order tight stocking limits for essential commodities thus forcing wheat supplies into the market. Still, can and (perhaps more important) should the government come in the way of a private transaction between two citizens of India?