-The Hindu Coal stock crunch at thermal plants India recorded a power supply shortage of 1,201 million units in October 2021 — the highest in 5.5 years — due to a crunch in coal stocks available with thermal plants. The shortage was mostly restricted to Gujarat, Haryana, Jharkhand, Punjab and Rajasthan. In October, Gujarat recorded a power shortage of 215 million units, the highest for any month in more than a decade. With a...

-TheQuint.com A recent SBI report, which states that the informal economy has declined, avoids even defining ‘informal economy’. A recent edition of “Ecowrap”, a publication of the research team of the State Bank of India (SBI), has claimed that India’s informal economy has sharply declined from 52.4 per cent in 2017-18 to between 15 and 20 per cent in 2020-21 in the three years since 2017-18. This finding by the SBI research...

-TheIndiaForum.in ‘Overpopulation’ can no longer be a concern in India, as across states and across religious groups fertility has been falling in recent decades and approaching replacement level. Fears about a demographic shift between religious groups are not based on fact. India’s demographic trends have been viewed optimistically in recent years, compared to the second half of the 20th century when the discourse was about “overpopulation”. Undoubtedly, the country is now passing...

-NetworkIdeas.org In recent weeks the media have featured stories bordering on the alarmist about a coal shortage in India. Coal inventories with thermal power plants had fallen to levels at which major country-wide power outages seemed inevitable. Fortunately, that has not (as yet) materialized, but it is indeed true that coal inventories with the power producers did collapse from the equivalent of around 30 days requirement to that for a couple...

-PTI/ Livemint.com Nomura expects India's fiscal deficit to come at 6.5 per cent as against the earlier expectation of 6.2 per cent and underlined that it will still be lower than the budgeted 6.8 per cent target The excise duty cuts on diesel and petrol will cost ₹45,000 crore and lead to a 0.3 percentage point widening on the Centre's fiscal deficit, a foreign brokerage said on Thursday. Going by the overall consumption,...