The foreign ministers of BIMSTEC (the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation) met virtually on April 1. That they made time to hold their 17th meeting is good news. They advanced the agenda, which had been arrested by the pandemic, since the last ministerial meeting held in August 2018. Their major task was to pave the way for the next summit, the grouping’s fifth, due to be held in Sri Lanka in the “next few months”. read more

Piramal Glass is a leading moulded glass bottle manufacturer in India. The $330 million company has four manufacturing facilities globally - two in India, at Kosamba and Jambusar in Gujarat, two overseas, in Sri Lanka and the U.S. The four facilities (with a combined infrastructure of 12 furnaces and 60 production lines) with a capacity of 950 tonnes of glass per day. Piramal Glass is predominantly an exporter of specialised glass bottles for perfumes, beauty products and medical vials, with read more

India is set to join an illustrious club, one which counts Argentina and Venezuela as members: countries that have suffered the ignominy of having their overseas assets seized for dishonouring their financial dues. While Argentina and Venezuela have had these seizures due to unpaid debts, India is in a similar situation because of its refusal to honour an award by an arbitration tribunal. Cairn Energy, U.K., plans to bring lawsuits in the U.S. and elsewhere to seize Indian read more

Death arrived in many forms in 1918. India was laid low by famines made worse by First World War requisitions of food grains from the Subcontinent, endemic cholera, typhoid and small-pox outbreaks, miasmic fevers, and spasmodic reappearances of the 1896 plague. There was ferment on the political scene too, with Indian Muslim angst over Indian troops (many Muslim) fighting the Ottoman Caliph’s armies across West Asia and the Eastern read more