Forex Reserves Drop by $1.9 bn to $298.3 Billion.

The country's forex reserves fell by $1.9 billion to $298.3 billion in the week ended November 12, RBI said in its weekly statistical supplement released on Friday. While foreign currency assets fell by $1.8 billion to $269.5 billion, gold reserves were stable at $21.7 billion in the week, the central bank said. Special drawing rights with the International Monetary Fund dropped by $73 million to $5.1 billion. At the same time, the reserves with the IMF were down by $34 million to $2.00 billion.

No plan to invest GPF in stock market: Finmin

The Centre on Friday said it does not intend to invest the provident fund of government employees, estimated at Rs 83,363 crore, in stock market. Minister of state for finance, Namo Narain Meena, said “no” to a written query on whether the government proposed to invest a part of the GPF corpus in the stock market. “The accumulations in the GPF is kept in the Public Account of India. Hence, there is no compromise on the safety of the GPF accumulation,” the minister said, adding the total corpus as on March 31, 2009 was Rs 83,363 crore. “As regards to return of GPF accumulations of the central government employees, the interest rate (8% per annum) was fixed to average secondary market yields on government securities of similar maturity,” Meena said.

SBI Subsidiary Banks Bill moved in House

The government on Friday introduced State Bank of India (Subsidiary Banks) Bill in Lok Sabha, which aims to remove the reference of State Bank of Indore from the Act following its merger with the country's largest lender. Finance minister Pranab Mukherjee moved the Bill amid protests from opposition party members who were demanding setting up of a joint parliamentary committee to probe the Rs 1.77 trillion-scam over allocation of second generation telecom spectrum. “After the acquisition of State Bank of Indore by SBI, references to the State Bank of Indore in the SBI (Subsidiary Banks) Act of 1959 have become redundant,” the finance ministry said in the statement and objectives of the Bill. “It is therefore proposed to amend the SBI (Subsidiary Banks) Act to omit such references,” it said.

India, Norway to set up centre for biodiversity

India and Norway will set up a Centre for Biodiversity Policy and Law in the National Biodiversity Authority, a statutory body under the Biological

Source : financialexpress.com