Jan Dhan Balance Tops Rs 5,000 Crore Mark 7 Crore Accounts Opened

Jan Dhan Balance Tops Rs 5,000 Crore Mark, Nearly 7 Crore Accounts Opened

NEW DELHI: The Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana has so far managed to bring over Rs 5,000 crore into the formal banking system, as close to seven crore account holders have started depositing cash into their bank accounts. A large part of this money was hitherto kept at home, with little or no productive use.

Latest data collated by the finance ministry showed that on November 3, 6.98 crore bank accounts had been opened across the country, with Rs 5,300 crore parked in them. Just a tad under 4 crore RuPay cards had been issued to these account holders, with the remaining expected to get the ATM card over the next few weeks, officials said.

At the current pace, it's a matter of days before bank employees help the government scale the target of opening 7.5 crore bank accounts under the financial inclusion scheme launched on August 29. The government was looking to achieve the target before January 26, 2015, well ahead of the earlier schedule of August 15, 2015. But with the target within reach, the finance ministry is now looking at doubling the target to open 15 crore accounts, said an official.

While banks have been ahead of the curve in opening bank accounts, the run rate for deposit accumulation has started picking up now. At current levels, each Jan Dhan account has a balance of around Rs 750. Initially, the average balance in each account was around Rs 500.

Historically financial inclusion accounts have been low value accounts for public sector banks with balances of less than Rs 1,000. For banks, experts said, the challenge is to ensure that the accounts remain active and account holders keep depositing funds as low account balance have in the past deterred bankers from pushing financial inclusion.

This time, however, the government is hoping that cash transfer into the accounts will ensure that transactions take place and sufficient balance is maintained. With the finance ministry also proposing overdraft facility based on the financial history of an account holders, there is an added attraction to maintain a healthy balance.

A recent report by Boston Consulting Group, Ficci and the Indian Banks' Association had pointed out that among the 16 crore no-frills accounts opened before Jan Dhan's launch, only a quarter had a single transaction last year. Similarly, a quarter actually had a balance. "In effect, five years of effort has led to about 20% addition to active savings bank accounts in the nation," said the report, released in September.

Chandra Shekhar Ghosh, CMD of micro finance institution Bandhan Financial Services, which recently got RBI permission to set up a bank network, told TOI on Tuesday that the challenge for banks is to deliver services at the doorstep. "The Jan Dhan Yojana is a very good initiative to open the accounts but how banks design the products and services and bring it to the doorstep that is the issue. You need to inculcate the habit of banking with those customers," he said. Source

German Publisher Bows To Google In News Licensing Row

German Publisher Bows To Google In News Licensing Row

Germany's biggest news publisher Axel Springer has scrapped a move to block Google from running snippets of articles from its newspapers, saying that the experiment had caused traffic to its sites to plunge.

Springer said a two-week-old experiment to restrict access by Google to some of its publications had caused web traffic to plunge for these sites, leading it to row back and let Google once again showcase Springer news stories in its search results.

Chief executive Mathias Doepfner said on Wednesday that his company would have "shot ourselves out of the market" if it had continued with its demands for the US firm to pay licensing fees. Springer had sought to restrict Google's use of news from four of its top-selling brands: welt.de, computerbild.de, sportbild.de and autobild.de, the company said.

Springer, which publishes Europe's top-selling daily newspaper Bild, said Google's grip over online audiences was too great to resist, a double-edged compliment meant to ram home the publisher's criticism of what it calls Google's monopoly powers.

Publishers in countries from Germany and France to Spain have pushed to pass new national copyright laws that force Google and other web aggregators to pay licensing fees — dubbed the Google Tax — when they publish snippets of their news articles.

Under German legislation that came into effect last year, publishers can prohibit search engines and similar services from using their news articles beyond headlines. Last week, Spain's upper house passed a similar law giving publishers an "inalienable" right to levy such licensing fees on Google.

Seeking to capitalize on the German law, two weeks ago VG Media — a consortium of around 200 German publishers, including Springer — said that Google could no longer publish snippets of text and images from their publications.

Google complied and ran only headlines of articles to limit their liability. It requires publishers who want their content to continue to show up in Google search results to give it explicit permission to do so and freedom from any liability for licensing fees under such laws.

Call To Regulators

Springer said traffic flowing from clicks on Google search results had fallen by 40 percent and traffic delivered via Google News had plummeted by 80 per cent in the past two weeks.

Doepfner said the resulting dramatic drop in traffic to his company's publications was proof of Google's overwhelming power in the search market. He said he hoped lawmakers, courts and competition regulators would take action to curb its powers.

"Others will have to pick up the ball now," the Springer boss told reporters on a conference call following the publication of the Berlin-based company's quarterly results.

A Google spokesman in Germany praised Springer's decision.

"The decision shows that Google is making a significant contribution to the economic success of news publishers," the spokesman said.

He said Google delivers more than half a billion clicks to German news sites per month. The search company has paid more than one billion euros in online advertising fees to German media publishers in the last three years, the spokesman said.

"Google wants to work in the future with publishers on new models to promote their websites and apps to increase traffic and to support digital publishing," he said.

The German cartel office in August decided not to pursue a complaint against Google by a group of publishers, including Springer, saying that the scope of new legislation was not yet entirely clear.

Google is the target of a European antitrust investigation into the operations of its online search business. The US firm accounts for more than 80 per cent of the European Internet search market and more than 90 percent of that in Germany.

The European Union's new digital commissioner Guenther Oettinger said last month that he was mulling a regional Internet copyright levy, taking aim at Google.

Last year, Google agreed to pay 60 million euros ($75 million) into a special fund to help French media develop their presence on the Internet, but search engines will not pay publishers in France for displaying content. Source

Dollar’s Ride Is About To End

Dollar’s Ride Is About To End

Under the stewardship of Shinzo Abe, the nation of Japan has become a global leader in debt, currency devaluation and inflation. Unfortunately for the Japanese, Abenomics is also leading Japan into a hyper inflationary depression, as the first of his three arrows has shot right through the yen and put a gaping hole in the wallets of every Japanese citizen.

The Bank of Japan (BOJ) has placed all its chips on the bet that inflation will cure all the nation’s economic problems. Making deflation public enemy number one is rather convenient when your country's public debt to GDP is the highest in the world. In order to end deflation, the central bank has purchased 70% of all newly-issued Japanese Government Bonds. All this money printing is intended to get prices rising, and it has been very successful. Japan's consumer prices rose 3.1 percent in August from a year earlier. Prices for fuel, light and water rose 6.4 percent on the year. But as real wages continue to fall, the bull’s eye appears to be directed on destroying the Japanese middle class.

In the nonsensical world of Abenomics--where inflation is viewed to be the progenitor of growth--the 3.1% CPI reading is deemed to be insufficient. This is because the core rate of 1.1 percent was far shy of the 2% read they are aiming for. So, as expected, there are calls coming from the lobotomized economic experts in Japan for yet more money printing from the BOJ.

Japan’s “experiment” with Abenomics would be much more interesting if we didn’t already know how it all ends. This so called experiment of massive debt monetization has already been tried in countries such as Weimar Germany and, more recently, in Zimbabwe; with disastrous results. The misguided policy of using inflation to create growth is predictably causing asset bubbles in JGBs and stocks. The BOJ is tirelessly printing money to monetize nearly all of the Japanese government’s enormous debt load and also to buy stocks. This has ballooned its equity portfolio alone to be an estimated 7 trillion yen ($63.6 billion). However, all this has done nothing to boost real GDP, balance trade or boost real wages. In fact, Industrial production shrank 1.5 percent month-on-month in August and spending among Japanese households fell a steeper-than-expected 4.7 percent. Source

The World's Best Whisky Isn't Scottish

The World's Best Whisky Isn't Scottish

The World’s Best Whisky Has Been Named and Scotland is Displeased

Scotland doesn't even have a whisky in the world's top five

The best whisky in the world is “near indescribable genius.” It scores 97.5 marks out of 100. It is also not Scottish.

That’s according to Jim Murray’s Whisky Bible 2015, a highly regarded ranking of fine global whisky. Specifically, reports the Telegraph, the top title belongs to Yamazaki Single Malt Sherry Cask 2013, from Japan’s oldest whiskey distillery, Suntory, founded in 1923.

What’s more, for the first time in the 12 years theWhisky Bible has been published, not a single Scottish whisky makes the bible’s top five. If that wasn’t bad enough for Scotland, which along with Ireland is the spiritual home of the drink, the best European whisky in the latest edition is English.

The Whisky Bible describes the winning Yamazaki whisky as “rich and fruity,” with a nose of “exquisite boldness” and finish of “light, teasing spice.” Just 18,000 bottles were made — it is sold out on the bible’s online shop, and it is available in just a few specialist shops in the U.K. for about $160.

American whiskies take second and third prize, including repeat second-place winner William Larue Weller, a Kentucky bourbon.

So what about auld Scotland? A Scottish whisky — the 19-year-old single malt Glenmorangie Ealanta — took the top spot just last year, also getting 97.5 marks.

But the book’s author, Jim Murray, writes that though hundreds of Scottish whiskies were among the more than 1,000 samples he tried from all around the world this year, they fell flat.

“Where were the complex whiskies in the prime of their lives?,” he wonders, calling this year’s rankings a “wake up call” for Scottish brands.

Ron Taylor, an independent wine and spirit judge and educator, tells TIME it’s no surprise that a Japanese whiskey took first place in Murray’s list, since Japanese whiskies regularly win prestigious competitions, even in Scotland.

Still, Taylor also said that rankings often reflect the taster’s personal preferences. Indeed, Taylor describes Japanese single malts as like a Lexus —“beautifully crafted, no vibration, smooth, consistent and always pleasing” — while their Scottish counterparts are more akin to a Maserati.

“The Scottish whiskeys, they’ll knock you around and slap you around the face a little bit,” says Taylor, who is from Scotland, but calls himself “a non partisan” drinker.

He also notes that Suntory, which makes the winning Japanese whiskey, also produces whiskey brands around the world — including, in fact, multiple Scottish whiskies.

Source