Indian Westerlies

I had blogged earlier about the matter regarding objection of India to sign Trade Facilitation Agreement(TFA) at WTO, as agreed at Bali ministerial. India has now agreed to sign the agreement as I had predicted in that post as one of the likely outcomes. However, when I see what is being signed, I wonder if it was worth to take the fight to this level. There is hardly much change, as far as I understand, from what could have been signed then, and what is being signed now, despite what our media projects as a great victory without any compromise.  India's objection to TFA was linked to following issues: that Agri negotiations (on public stockholding for food security purposes) are not going at the expected pace and direction. As Agri is part of the package, there is no meaning in signing only one part of the package, i.e. TFA, while the other part, i.e. Agri negotiation, is still in its infancy at the table.  Specific inside the Agri negotiations, India had various i...

I had blogged about the matter of controlling gold imports into India initially here , and then here  when RBI relaxed the controls to include star export houses. Now the RBI has cleared out all such controls through this notification , and gold is free to be imported, after payment of required customs duty which is around 10 percent.  Recap: 1. Alarmed by rising current account deficit and rising gold imports during early and mid 2013, RBI, in consultation with the Govt., used provisions of FEMA to bring out a circular to curb gold imports during August 2013. Some supplementary circulars were later on issued to clarify the matter, effectively making it clear that no one, including banks, could import gold for domestic sale. The language of the circular effectively led to a ban on import of gold.  2. This resulted in significant decrease in import of gold into the country. However, the gold imported for export purposes was out of purview and such gold was stil...