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Basic wage’ under EPF Act cannot be equated with the definition of ‘minimum wage’ under the Minimum Wages Act, 1948

Copy of judgement attached

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday suggested the G20 trade ministers work collectively to ensure equitable competition between large and small sellers as there are challenges in the fast growing cross-border e-commerce.

In a video message at the G20 Trade and Investment Minister’s meeting here, he also emphasised on the need to address the problems faced by consumers in fair price discovery and grievance handling mechanisms. ‘Digitising processes and use of e-commerce have the potential to enhance market access. I am glad that your group is working on the ‘High Level Principles for the Digitalisation of Trade Documents’. These principles can help countries in implementing cross-border electronic trade measures, and reduce compliance burdens.

‘As cross-border e-commerce continues to grow, there are challenges as well. We need to work collectively to ensure equitable competition between large and small sellers,’ he said.

Trade ministers of G20 grouping have gathered to discuss ways to promote international commerce and investments. Terming the government initiative Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) as a game-changer, he said it will democratise the digital market. 

Highlighting the challenges of the growth in cross-border e-commerce, the Prime Minister suggested working collectively to ensure equitable competition between large and small sellers. He also emphasised the need to address the problems faced by consumers in fair price discovery and grievance handling mechanisms.

The SOP defines the process of filing of JD application by the member, approval of JD by the Employer, its receipt in the Regional Office and its approval or rejection by the competent authority in a time-bound manner. It also prescribes the list of documents to be enclosed for changes in various parameters where the members prefer a change/addition through JD. The timeline for completion of the Joint Declaration request has also been fixed.

Copy of circular attached.

The Hon’ble Madras High Court noted that every employee has a “right to vent” and the management could not take action against the employees for messages that were posted in a WhatsApp group chat expressing critical views against the management so long as such messages were otherwise within the legal bounds.

Copy of judgement attached

The Union Cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, today approved the expansion of the Digital India programme. The total outlay is ₹14,903 crores. As per the Programme, digital document verification facility under DigiLocker will be available to MSMEs and other organisations. Further, 1,200 startups will be supported in Tier 2/3 cities.

Other features of the Programme include:

• 6.25 lakh IT professionals will be re-skilled and up-skilled under the FutureSkills Prime Programme; 2.65 lakh persons will be trained in information security under the Information Security & Education Awareness Phase (ISEA) Programme.
• 540 additional services will be available under the Unified Mobile Application for New-age Governance (UMANG) app/ platform. At present over 1,700 services are already available on UMANG.
• 3 Centres of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence on health, agriculture and sustainable cities will be set up.
• New initiatives in the area of cyber security including development of tools and integration of more than 200 sites with the National Cyber Coordination Centre.

The Digital India programme was launched on 1st July, 2015 to enable digital delivery of services to citizens.

India’s exports contracted by 15.88 per cent to USD 32.25 billion in July this year from USD 38.34 billion in the same month last year, the government data showed on Monday. Imports during the month also declined by 17 per cent to USD 52.92 billion from USD 63.77 billion in July 2022.

During April-July this fiscal, the exports dipped by 14.5 per cent to USD 136.22 billion. Imports during the period also declined by 13.79 per cent to USD 213.2 billion. Commerce secretary Sunil Barthawal said that the global headwinds are still there. There is a decline in exports and imports from several countries.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has announced the development of a Public Tech Platform for Frictionless Credit. The Platform is being developed by Reserve Bank Innovation Hub (RBIH), a wholly owned subsidiary of RBI.

As per the RBI, the Public Tech Platform would enable delivery of frictionless credit by facilitating seamless flow of required digital information to lenders. The end-to-end digital platform will have an open architecture, open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and standards, to which all financial sector players can connect seamlessly in a ‘plug and play’ model.

The Platform is intended to be rolled out as a pilot project in a calibrated fashion, both in terms of access to information providers and use cases. The aim is to bring about efficiency in the lending process in terms of reduction of costs, quicker disbursement, and scalability.

During the pilot, the platform will focus on products such as Kisan Credit Card loans up to ₹1.6 lakh per borrower, Dairy Loans, MSME loans (without collateral), Personal loans and Home loans through participating banks. The platform will also enable linkage with services such as Aadhaar e-KYC, land records from onboarded State Governments (Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, and Maharashtra), Satellite data, PAN Validation, Transliteration, Aadhaar e-signing, account aggregation by Account Aggregators (AAs), milk pouring data from select dairy co-operatives, house/property search data etc.

Based on the learnings, the scope and coverage would be expanded to include more products, information providers and lenders during the pilot.

A law made for processing data and amends various legislations including Right to Information Act and IT Act. It will come into force on such date as the Central Government may announce by notification..

Copy of the notification is attached.

The Reserve Bank of India on Thursday decided to keep policy rate unchanged for the third time in a row as it maintains heightened vigil on inflation. The rate increase cycle was paused in April after six consecutive rate hikes aggregating to 250 basis points since May 2022.

Announcing the bi-monthly monetary policy, RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das said the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) unanimously decided to keep the rate unchanged at 6.5 per cent.

He said the MPC will remain watchful of the inflation and remains resolute to its commitment to align inflation to the targeted level.

While keeping the interest rate intact, Das said headline inflation still remains above RBI’s target of 4 per cent.

The MPC meeting took place against the backdrop of consumer price-based (CPI) inflation on some food items like tomato, wheat and rice that have witnessed surge in price in the last few weeks.

The government has mandated RBI to ensure CPI inflation at 4 per cent with a margin of 2 per cent on either side.