India, Malaysia sign $36-bn investment proposals
Major Indian and Malaysian companies in the oil and gas, infrastructure and engineering sectors on Monday signed investment proposals worth $36 billion.
Companies such as Adani Ports, Andhra Pradesh Gas Distribution Corporation and Natco Pharma signed 31 memoranda of understanding (MoUs) with Malaysian companies and industry bodies to facilitate investments in both countries. The developments were part of the visit by Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak to India.
As of December 2016, Malaysia was the 25th largest source of investment into the country, with $829 million worth of foreign direct investment (FDI). India is the ninth largest investor in Malaysia, as of 2016, with nearly $300 million worth of investments across eight manufacturing projects, Razak said at a business forum. The prime minister also called for a speedy conclusion to the negotiations on the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) agreement, which both nations are a part of. “It is more relevant than ever before that we conclude RCEP, now that Trans-Pacific Partnership is buried.”
The RCEP is a proposed free-trade agreement (FTA) between the 10 countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) and the six with which this bloc has FTAs — Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand. Negotiations, which began in 2012, was to have concluded in 2015.
While negotiations on RCEP recently broke a deadlock, India is now under pressure to update its offers on tariff reduction on goods and services trade before the next meet. At a ministerial meet held in Laos in August last year, India had made its boldest move so far by shifting its longheld stance of a three-tiered, differential levels of tariff reduction to a single one applicable to all RCEP members, subject to the provision of minimum deviations for various nations. Also, the Trans-Pacific Partnership factor continues to impact RCEP talks. The Congress on Monday accused the Modi government of attempting to subvert the Right to Information (RTI) Act by seeking to tweak its rules and surreptitiously raise the bar to make access to information difficult for ordinary people.
The Opposition party also called upon all progressive forces believing in transparency to unite and oppose any dilution of the RTI structure.
“Ever since this government has taken over, there has been an attitude of acted neglect towards the RTI, not only RTI queries were not answered but even the appeal processes have been very cavalierly treated. There has been a non-formal atte- mpt over the past three odd years to scuttle the RTI Act. And finally it seems that the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government has decided to formalise the process of subverting the RTI,” Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari said.
Alleging that the government was changing RTI norms by bringing in a word limit for applications and higher charges to make it expensive to seek information, the Congress also wondered whether the move was intended to intimidate people.
“By trying to alter the RTI rules, what is the intention of the government? Right to Inform citizens or ‘Right to Intimidate’ them?,” senior Congress leader Ahmed Patel said.
Tewari said the draft RTI rules for 2017 which have been put out in public domain look extremely innocuous "but the devil lies in the detail".
“It is the final print which gives away the intent of the government and I will give you only five examples,” he said.
The Congress leader said this legislation was perhaps the single-most empowering instrument enacted in the past 70 years and for the first time ever “the opaque innards of those administration and governance were exposed to the antiseptic sunlight of public scrutiny”. PTI
“There has been a non-formal attempt over the past three odd years to scuttle the RTI Act”