7. If it’s a brand-new Cold War, will India remain non-aligned?

The United States and China are “basically in the beginning of a new Cold War”, Orville Schell, director of the Center on US-China Relation, told Business Insider The Cold War example is “not perfect however there are elements” comparable, said Elizabeth Economy of the Council on Foreign Relations. US President Donald Trump has mentioned “cutting off the whole relationship with China”.

There are other parallels The US-China tensions are re-aligning other countries’ relations with Beijing.

• Think About Australia. China has suspended beef imports from four major meat processing companies in Australia, seemingly for “ duplicated violations of evaluation and quarantine requirements”, and enforced an 80%tariff on import of barley.
• This after Australian prime minister Scott Morrison required an independent examination into the origin of the coronavirus. It is not an easy call for Australia, regardless of being an US ally. China is its greatest export market, buying 30%of its goods by worth. In 2017-18, Australia exported $1233 billion in products and services to China, equal to about 6.7%of GDP.

And India?

• India’s relations with China is nowhere close as it had actually been with Russia throughout the Cold War. After all, border disagreements with China remain unsolved– reminded of as just recently as this month— and Beijing is a close ally of Pakistan. There are also the scars of the 1962 war.
• India’s relations with the United States, meanwhile, is deepening– India is a Quad country, in addition to Japan, Australia and US. “More power to India-US friendship,” PM Narendra Modi tweeted Saturday, after Trump revealed the United States was donating ventilators.
• Yet, New Delhi is not antagonistic towards Beijing– China is stronger militarily and economically, and holds veto power at the UN Security Council. China’s FDI in India has actually increased to $2.34 billion, according to official information. Entrance Home, a think-tank, says the actual figure could be $6.2 billion, including rerouted financial investments.
• However India may soon need to make a difficult choice. On Monday (May 18 ), the World Health Assembly, the decision-making body of the WHO, is to select granting Taiwan an observer status. China thinks about Taiwan an abandoner province and vehemently opposes its inclusion in worldwide institutions. India follows the “One China policy”, however pressure is installing on New Delhi

• Lockdown 4: The central government on Sunday extended the nationwide lockdown by two weeks till May 31, albeit with considerable relaxation, and provided state federal governments more leeway in choosing the category of Covid-19 break out zones. All standalone shops and markets can now open, other than in containment locations, and e-commerce companies can now likewise offer non-essential items even in red zones. Domestic and international guest flights, metro rail services, hotels and dine-in restaurants, shopping malls, educational institutions and large public gatherings, consisting of religious parishes stay prohibited, irrespective of zones. The complete list here
• The guidelines on using Aarogya Setu contact tracing app, meanwhile, was reduced and now specifies the “employers on best shot basis ought to make sure” the app is set up by all workers having suitable smart phones. The story here
• The break out: India’s day-to-day cases crossed 5,000 for the first time on Sunday, with 2,347 of those reported in Maharashtra. With 154 casualties, Sunday also marked the greatest single-day death toll, taking the overall Covid-19 casualties to 3,023 The total number of reported cases stood at 95,679
• Migrant crisis: In Gujarat’s Shapar village near Rajkot, hundreds of irritated migrant employees tossed stones at cops and reporters, leaving 5 cops and a TV press reporter hurt. In UP, migrant labourers obstructed the NH-2 in Mathura district after they were stopped from continuing their journey. A 6,000- strong gathering of migrant labourers from Bihar protested in UP’s Saharanpur.

On rural tasks

• Financing Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Sunday allocated an additional Rs 40,000 crore towards the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Work Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), the rural work scheme, thus taking the overall allowance to over Rs 1 lakh crore (Rs 61,000 crore allocated during Budget plan) for this fiscal year.
• The rural work scheme, which the Centre informed last July it “was not in favour of“, has actually emerged as the most potent safeguard in the middle of the pandemic-induced financial slump.

Online education

• To promote online education, 100 top institutes will be instantly permitted to begin online courses, and 12 academic TELEVISION channels will be launched, she stated.
• Not new: The push towards e-learning was amongst the measures Sitharaman announced throughout her Union budget plan in February. As part of the proposed New Education Policy (NEP), Sitharaman said in the budget plan speech that the top 100 educational institutions in the National Institutional Ranking framework will be enabled to offer degree-level, full-fledged online education programmes.

For industry

• To restrict the damage caused by the pandemic, the minimum threshold to start insolvency procedures under the Insolvency and Personal bankruptcy Code will be raised to Rs 1 crore, from Rs 1 lakh, and no new procedures will be considered up to a year. This is anticipated to insulate MSMEs from going under.
• Imperfections in CSR (business social obligation) reporting, insufficiencies in board reports, filing defaults and hold-up in holding AGMs, will be decriminalised. Decriminalisation and associated amendments in the Business Act were proposed in the Budget plan and cleared by the cabinet previously in March.
• The centre will also privatise public sector business in non-strategic sectors, she said. Given the economic slump, experts do not expect this to take off quickly; privatisation of Air India and stake sale in BPCL, for example, could not be completed in fiscal year 2020 as prepared.

On state borrowing

• State governments will be conditionally enabled– based upon expansion of One Country One card, metropolitan local body reforms and such– to obtain as much as 5%of their state GDP, modifying the 3?p as set by the Fiscal Obligation and Spending Plan Mana