By Shreya Maskara
While experts found out the whopping cost of violence in India for 2017, which was around 9% of the annual GDP, the government’s crackdown on shell companies has successfully identified over 16,000 companies. Meanwhile, the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is attending the annual meet of theShanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), where India and China signed several bilateral agreements. Here are some important stories about the economy you may have missed last week.
Economic cost of violence for India: $1.19 trillion
According to a report prepared by the Institute for Economics and Peace, violence cost the Indian economy $1.19 trillion last year (PPP). The IEP report which analyses over 163 countries estimated that the per person cost of violence in India is around $595.4, which is around 9% of the country’s GDP.
On a global scale, violence cost the global economy around $14.76 trillion, which roughly translates to 12.4% of the overall GDP. The global economic impact of violence is defined by the IEP as any expenditure and economic impact due to containing, preventing and dealing with the consequences of violence.
Government identifies 16,537 ‘confirmed’ shell companies
The Task Force on shell companies informed on Friday that 16,537 companies have been confirmed on the grounds of information received from the various Law Enforcement Agencies. The Task Force was commissioned in February 2017, three months after demonisation, and has also identified 80,670 more suspected companies using certain Red Flag Indicators. “The Task Force has identified certain Red Flag Indicators, which will be used to identify more shell companies,” informed the Ministry of Corporate Affairs statement. Since its inception, the Task Force has met 8 times.
In a drive to weed out black money and illegal activities from the economy, the Registrar of Companies removed the names of 2,26,166 companies, which had not filed their financial statements or annual returns for a continuous period of two or more financial years in 2017-18.
Updates from the Council of Heads of States of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)
Prime Minister Modi is at the annual meeting of the SCO currently underway in Qingdao, China. The current member countries of the SCO include China, India Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russian, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Combined the SCO countries account for 42% of the world’s population and 20% of the world’s GDP.
Several agreements and pacts were signed between India and the host nation, and Prime Minister Modi also held several meetings with other leaders of SCO countries. Here are the highlights:
- China’s General Administration of Customs and India’s Department of Agriculture, Cooperation and Farmers Welfare on Phytosanitary signed an agreement about the requirements for exporting rice from India to China. The 2006 requirements have now been updated to include the export of non-Basmati rice from India, which is currently prohibited.
- India and China signed a bilateral agreement about continuing to share hydrological data on the Brahmaputra river.
- China also announced a $4.7 billion special lending facility under the framework of the SCO Inter-bank Consortium. China will provide 3,000 training opportunities over the next three years for human resource development for SCO member states.
Shreya Maskara is a senior copy editor at Qrius