- Thursday, April 25, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
Here are news in brief related to Indian economy and business for Friday, February 24, 2023:
The government of the Indian state of Gujarat on Friday presented a Rs 3.01 lakh crore (£30.3 billion) budget which imposed no new taxes. State finance minister Kanubhai Desai presented the budget for 2023-24 in the Assembly in Gandhinagar on the second day of the Budget Session, PTI reported. This was the first budget of the new Bharatiya Janata Party government headed by chief minister Bhupendra Patel which took office in December last year after the saffron party won a landslide victory in the Assembly polls. Desai said the budget outlay of Rs 301,021.61 crore for 2023-24 indicates a “significant increase” of Rs 57,077 crore (£5.76 billion), or 23.38 per cent, in comparison to the previous fiscal. Of the total outlay of Rs 3.01 lakh crore, Rs 1.91 lakh crore (£19.2 billion) has been allocated for “development expenditure” while Rs 1.04 lakh crore (£10.4 billion) will be spent as “non-developmental expenditure”.
Germany is set to pursue a $5.2 billion (£4.35 billion) deal with India to jointly build six conventional submarines in the country during chancellor Olaf Scholz’s two-day visit kicking off on Saturday (25), Reuters reported citing two Indian and two German sources. The naval project is the latest attempt by a western military-manufacturing power to curb New Delhi’s dependence on Russia for military hardware. New Delhi is desperate to replace its ageing submarine fleet, with 11 of its 16 conventional submarines more than two decades old, as it seeks to counter neighbour China’s growing presence in the Indian Ocean. An Indian diplomatic source told Reuters that the south Asian nation has asked Germany for an assurance for joint manufacturing for the submarines, and not just supply-side support. Another official from India’s external affairs ministry said that “Scholz was determined to reinvigorate trade and defence ties with India”, the report added.
YS Jagan Mohan Reddy, chief minister of the south-eastern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh (AP), said ahead of the Global Investment Summit in his state on March 3 and 4 that the tireless efforts towards staging the event is a remarkable feat and is already attracting global industry leaders. “It is a significant accomplishment that investors of the calibre of Birlas, Bangars, Adanis, and Bhajankas are now planning to invest in Andhra Pradesh, as their inauguration of plants in the state is a testament to the fact that AP has earned their trust,” he was quoted as saying by ANI/NewsVoir.
Nepal is preparing a memorandum of understanding in which India’s hydroelectric major NHPC will collaborate with state-run Vidyut Utpadan Company Ltd (VUCL) to develop a 480 megawatt (MW) semi-reservoir hydropower project in the western part of the country at an estimated cost of Rs 92 billion (928.5 million), an official said on Friday, PTI reported. The move comes days after Nepal and India inked an agreement to increase the power import and export capacity through the Dhalkebar-Muzaffarpur transmission line from 600 MW to 800 MW. “Our government has asked NHPC, a government of India company, to collaborate with Nepal’s Vidyut Utpadan Company Ltd, to develop a hydropower project,” Baburaj Adhikari, information officer at Nepal’s ministry of energy, water resources and irrigation told PTI.
India’s Adani Power on Thursday promised to supply electricity to Bangladesh at a reduced price keeping consistent with the generation cost in the country’s existing coal-fired plants, PTI reported. “The Adani will import the coal for its plants at the same price the Bangladeshi coal-run plants do for themselves,” the mass-circulation Prothom Alo newspaper reported quoting an Adani official. It said the Indian company agreed to revise its procurement price for coal to keep the per unit power price almost equal to those of Bangladeshi coal-fired plants like the Rampal and Payra, the two joint-venture installations with India and China. “A responsible official of Adani group in Bangladesh has confirmed the development to Prothom Alo,” the newspaper reported while Bangladesh officials declined to comment immediately.
In a move to strengthen its worldwide footprint, Brinton Pharmaceuticals Ltd. on Thursday inaugurated its Global Research and Development Centre in the UK, ANI/NewsVoir reported. Unveiling the global R&D centre located at the Health Technical & Business Park, Runcorn, Cheshire, England, in the presence of Rahulkumar Darda, chairman and managing director, Brinton Pharma, UK minister of state at the department for business & trade Nigel Huddleston said, “I am delighted to be inaugurating this new facility in Runcorn, which will help our domestic healthcare sector and create highly-skilled jobs. This is an excellent example of the benefits UK-India trade can bring to both nations.”
