on 24-Dec-2020 (Thu)

Apple placed all fresh production orders on hold for its Taiwanese supplier Wistron. This embargo may affect all Wistron units, but the trigger was one of the biggest expressions of industrial unrest in India in recent years — at a new facility set up by the firm in Kolar, Karnataka, to manufacture iPhones, among other things. Violence broke out at the unit on December 12 after several workers raised slogans protesting against non-payment of their dues, a protest that escalated. In Kolar, Wistron claimed ₹437 crore of damages from the incident even as the Centre and the State government reacted with alacrity, given the importance of the project for India to establish its credentials as an alternative manufacturing base to China. The State said it was disturbed and around 160 people were arrested.

The Teesta water dispute remains unresolved. The Citizenship (Amendment) Act and the proposed National Register of Citizens, which Ms. Hasina called “unnecessary”, have created a negative impression about India.

China is making deep inroads into Bangladesh by ramping up infrastructure investments and expanding economic cooperation.

Bangladesh, India’s largest trading partner in South Asia, has expanded its economy and improved social welfare.

he Bangladesh Nationalist Party and its ally, the pro-Pakistan Jamaat-e-Islami. But another Islamist group, Hifazat-e-Islam, made headlines recently when it organised mass protests against French President Emmanuel Macron and opposed the Hasina government’s plan to build a statue of the country’s founding father, Bangabandhu Mujibur Rahman, in Dhaka’s suburbs.

Sharing the waters of the Teesta river, which originates in the Himalayas and flows through Sikkim and West Bengal to merge with the Brahmaputra in Assam and (Jamuna in Bangladesh), is perhaps the most contentious issue between two friendly neighbours, India and Bangladesh.

or West Bengal, Teesta is equally important, considered the lifeline of half-a-dozen districts in North Bengal. Bangladesh has sought an “equitable” distribution of Teesta waters from India, on the lines of the Ganga Water Treaty of 1996, but to no avail. The failure to ink a deal had its fallout on the country’s politics, putting the ruling Awami League in a spot.

Strategic Foresight Group, a Mumbai-based think-tank. “Estimates suggested that the Teesta river has a mean annual flow of approximately 60 billion cubic metre (BCM).

the Emissions Gap Report 2020 of the UNEP includes India among nine G20 members who are on track to achieve their unconditional commitments under the Paris pact, based on pre-COVID-19 projections.

the G20 bloc as a whole, responsible for 78% of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), was not expected to meet its pledges, but some countries and the EU as a group announced higher ambition at the summit.

India faces a particular challenge, in moving its pandemic rehabilitation spending away from traditional brown sector policies aligned with fossil fuel use to green territory.

Mr. Modi took credit for expansion of forests, which, according to the national pledge under the Paris Agreement, will serve as a carbon sink of 2.5 bn to 3 bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2030.

Mr. Modi took credit for expansion of forests, which, according to the national pledge under the Paris Agreement, will serve as a carbon sink of 2.5 bn to 3 bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2030

The Centre has questioned the veracity of State afforestation data and said only a fourth of the claims they made were deemed credible.

India was the only major G20 country that was on track towards keeping to its nationally determined commitments to halt runaway global warming.

India, however, didn't announce new goals on Saturday. Mr. Modi, as well as President Ramnath Kovind have earlier announced that India was planning to increase its renewable energy capacity to 450 GW by 2030.

India has announced its Nationally Determined Contribution of reducing emissions intensity of GDP by 33-35% by 2030 along with its renewable energy and forest cover targets. However, Paris Agreement rules say that countries were expected to announce more ambitious targets by before the next UN conference in Glasgow, United Kingdom, 2021.

India had pioneered the International Solar Alliance, the Prime Minister said as well as the Coalition for Disaster Relief.

The online event was organised to mark five years since the signing of the Paris Agreement, in which 190 countries committed to taking action to limit global temperature from rising beyond 2­°C.

wholesale price-based inflation declined 1.81% in June due to decline in prices of fuel and power,

two consecutive months of positive IIP growth is a good sign, one must wait for few more months to believe that the economy is firmly in recovery mode.

What Is a Carbon Credit?

A carbon credit is a permit that allows the company that holds it to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases. One credit permits the emission of a mass equal to one ton of carbon dioxide.

Companies that pollute are awarded credits that allow them to continue to pollute up to a certain limit.

Companies get a set number of credits, which decline over time. They can sell any excess to another company.

As noted, a carbon credit is equal to one ton of carbon dioxide.

The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) developed a carbon credit proposal to reduce worldwide carbon emissions in a 1997 agreement known as the Kyoto Protocol. The agreement set binding emission reduction targets for the countries that signed it. Another agreement, known as the Marrakesh Accords, spelled out the rules for how the system would work.

The Kyoto Protocol divided countries into industrialized and developing economies. Industrialized countries, collectively called Annex 1, operated in their own emissions trading market. If a country emitted less than its target amount of hydrocarbons, it could sell its surplus credits to countries that did not achieve its Kyoto level goals, through an Emission Reduction Purchase Agreement (ERPA).

The Paris Climate Agreement

The Kyoto protocol was revised in 2012 in an agreement known as the Doha Amendment, which has yet to be ratified. As of January 2020, the agreement was still about eight votes short of the 144 votes from member nations that it would need to be approved.

What Is the Kyoto Protocol?

The Kyoto Protocol is an international agreement that aimed to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and the presence of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere. The essential tenet of the Kyoto Protocol was that industrialized nations needed to lessen the amount of their CO2 emissions.

The Kyoto Protocol is an international agreement that called for industrialized nations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions significantly.

This meant each nation had a different target to meet by that year. Members of the European Union (EU) pledged to cut emissions by 8% while the U.S. and Canada promised to reduce their emissions by 7% and 6% respectively by 2012

The Kyoto Protocol Today?

In 2016, when the Paris Climate Agreement went into force, the United States was one of the principal drivers of the agreement, and President Obama hailed it as “a tribute to American leadership.”

The Paris Climate Agreement

The Paris Climate Agreement is a landmark environmental pact that was adopted by nearly every nation in 2015 to address climate change and its negative effects.

The Kyoto Protocol recognized that developed countries are principally responsible for the current high levels of GHG emissions in the atmosphere as a result of more than 150 years of industrial activity. As such, the protocol placed a heavier burden on developed nations than less-developed nations.

The Kyoto Protocol mandated that 37 industrialized nations plus the EU cut their GHG emissions. Developing nations were asked to comply voluntarily, and more than 100 developing countries, including China and India, were exempted from the Kyoto agreement altogether.

Crony capitalism refers to a capitalist society that is based on the close relationships between business people and the state. Instead of success being determined by a free market and the rule of law, the success of a business is dependent on the favoritism that is shown to it by the government in the form of tax breaks, government grants, and other incentives.

Crony capitalism is widely blamed for a range of social and economic woes. Both socialists and capitalists blame each other for the rise of crony capitalism. Socialists believe that crony capitalism is the inevitable result of pure capitalism.

Capitalism is an economic system in which private individuals or businesses own capital goods. The production of goods and services is based on supply and demand in the general market—known as a market economy—rather than through central planning—known as a planned economy or command economy.

The purest form of capitalism is free market or laissez-faire capitalism. Here, private individuals are unrestrained. They may determine where to invest, what to produce or sell, and at which prices to exchange goods and services.

Pure capitalism can be contrasted with pure socialism (where all means of production are collective or state-owned) and mixed economies (which lie on a continuum between pure capitalism and pure socialism).

The real-world practice of capitalism typically involves some degree of so-called “crony capitalism” due to demands from business for favorable government intervention and governments’ incentive to intervene in the economy.

It is possible to have a capitalist economy without complete free enterprise, and possible to have a free market without capitalism.

"Free enterprise" can roughly be understood to mean economic exchanges free of coercive government influence. Although unlikely, it is possible to conceive of a system where individuals choose to hold all property rights in common. Private property rights still exist in a free enterprise system, although the private property may be voluntarily treated as communal without a government mandate.

When the government owns some but not all of the means of production, but government interests may legally circumvent, replace, limit, or otherwise regulate private economic interests, that is said to be a mixed economy or mixed economic system.

In contrast, pure capitalism, also known as laissez-faire capitalism or anarcho-capitalism, (such as professed by Murray N. Rothbard) all industries are left up to private ownership and operation, including public goods, and no central government authority provides regulation or supervision of economic activity in general.