The minister said consultations were held by the insurance regulator, IRDAI, with various stakeholders on increasing the FDI limit. Sitharaman highlighted that insurance companies were facing liquidity pressure and that foreign investment will supplement domestic long-term resources and further insurance penetration in the country
Facing the law
FM Sitharaman told the Rajya Sabha that fugitive businessmen Vijay Mallya, Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi are “coming back to India to face the law”. Taking a jibe at the opposition parties, Sitharaman quipped, “who gave them the money, all of us know”.
Final supplementary
The Lok Sabha passed the second and final batch of supplementary demand for grants for 2020-21 under which the government had sought additional expenditure of `6.28 lakh crore, of which the net cash outgo is `4.12 lakh crore. The government intends to provide additional grant of `2.50 lakh crore to Food Corporation of India under National Food Security Act (NFSA), 2013 and for additional allocation of food grains under the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana, the Atmanirbhar Bharat Package and for repayment of NSSF loan to FCI.
BICL Closure
The government informed Parliament that the proposal for closure of British India Corporation Ltd. (BICL) is in the advanced stage. The corporation has been incurring losses since its nationalization in the year 1981. “Owing to continuance of losses, BICL was referred to the Board for Industrial & Financial Reconstruction (BIFR) in 1991 and was declared sick in 1992. The government approved revival schemes in November, 2001, 2005 and 2011 also failed,” textiles minister Smriti Zubin Irani told Rajya Sabha.
Tech use in surveys
The government informed Rajya Sabha that technological interventions like ‘Computer Assisted Personal Interview’ (CAPI) has been introduced to reduce the time lag between completion of field work of survey and publication of results. Further, the ministry of statistics and programme implementation is developing a General Survey Solution called ‘e-Survey Instrument and Generalised Multimodal Application’ (e-SIGMA) and real time validation that would reduce the time lag. The ministry is utilizing handheld devices such as tablets for capturing data in the surveys, statistics minister Rao Inderjit Singh said.
Project Delays
As on February 1, 2021, out of 1,739 central sector projects, 539 projects are having time overrun and 209 projects are showing both cost overrun and time overrun, Parliament was informed Thursday. Of these 209 projects, 109 are in railways, 24 in roads, transport and highways sector, and 21 each in power and petroleum.
Illustrations: Anirban Bora