Andhranews

New Delhi, Oct. 4: The fall in the prices of crude oil in the global market is unlikely to benefit the consumers as of now, as finance minister P. Chidambaram on Wednesday indicated that the lowering of prices will go towards reducing the amount of subsidy burden. Prices in the international crude oil market have been coming down since the last week of August, with tensions in West Asia showing signs of simmering down. During the crisis period, prices had soared.

“When the international oil prices increased, we did not pass the entire burden on to the consumers and the reduced international oil prices have only lessened the subsidy burden of firms like ONGC, oil marketing companies and the government,” Mr Chidambaram told reporters on the sidelines of “Exposition of Khadi, Village and Coir Industries”. The reduced subsidy would mean that funds would be available for “re-investment” by these companies, said Mr Chidambaram.

The finance minister said that the reduced international prices would not affect the size of oil bonds to be issued by the government later. The government has approved the issue of the first tranche of oil bonds, amounting to Rs 14,150 crores. This is out of a total of Rs 28,300 crores to state-owned oil marketing companies. The oil bonds are meant to compensate the oil marketing companies for the losses on retail sales of petrol and diesel.

Oil industry experts say that with the current decline in oil prices, the oil marketing companies have managed to break even on the sale of petrol, while still bearing a loss of Rs 5 on each litre of diesel. Meanwhile, on the progress in the small-scale sector, the finance minister said on Wednesday that the government was well on its way to double the credit flow to the small-scale sector.

New Delhi, Oct. 4: The Planning Commission is not in favour of granting concessional finance to SEZ projects, which is similar to the view held by the Reserve Bank of India on the issue. Speaking to the media, Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia, said here on Wednesday, “Finance for SEZs is okay but not concessional finance.” He said SEZs are infrastructural projects, so they should be charged interest at par with other infrastructure projects. The RBI has directed banks to treat lendings to SEZs at par with real estate, which will make advances to these zones more expensive. On the possibility of misuse of tax incentives, Mr Ahluwalia said the finance ministry has assured that they will plug all loopholes.

He also said that the chief ministers would have to take decisions on allocating agricultural land for SEZs keeping in view the fairness of price for acquiring land.
There is a lot of debate on converting agricultural land for industrial use when SEZs come up on fertile land. Farmers in various places in the country have been agitating against SEZs.

“The state governments should handle the situation in the best possible way,” he said. But, he added, compensation must be adequate. Mr Ahluwalia’s comments follow the Prime Minister’s caveat to the States on excessive sops for SEZ projects. But commerce minister Kamal Nath had sought the Prime Minister’s intervention against a RBI directive to banks to treat SEZs at par with real estate projects for lending purposes.

Hyderabad, Oct. 4: CCL Products (India) Ltd, a maker of instant coffee, will be investing Rs 200 crores to expand its capacity to 25,000 tonnes in the next four years, chairman and managing director Challa Rajendra Prasad said here on Wednesday. CCL Products will be investing Rs 50 crores per year to progressively increase its manufacturing capacity, which will include raising the plant’s capacity to 15,000 tonnes per annum of instant, spray-dried coffee, 6,000 tpa of freeze-dried coffee and over 4,000 tpa of liquid coffee, Mr Prasad said. The manufacturing unit is in Guntur district and most of CCL Products’ are exported, to be sold as private labels in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.

About three per cent of the production is marketed in India, under Continental Speciale brand of instant coffee. Mr Prasad, a first-generation entrepreneur, said CCL Products was not keen on expanding its domestic presence because of the severe competition from established players like Nestle. “We tried to go national with Continental Speciale in 1996. Now, we are focused on developing our export markets,” he said. CCL Products’ green coffee supplies to Costa Coffee, the second largest coffee chain in the UK, through a British partner. He said CCL Products, a listed company, will be launching liquid coffee by January, making it the third such company in Asia to do so, after Japan and South Korea.

Meanwhile, CCL Products posted a net profit of Rs 12 crores in the second quarter of 2006-7, up 48 per cent from the Rs 8 crores in the same previous-year quarter. Net sales rose by 61 per cent to Rs 50 crores. CCL posted a net profit of Rs 21 crores in the first half of 2006-07, an increase of 39 per cent on-year, while net sales rose 81 per cent to Rs 81 crores.

Hyderabad, Oct. 4: Xilinx, Inc., the $1.73 billion global supplier of programmable logic solutions, on Wednesday announced the opening of its largest overseas development centre in Hyderabad, even as it expects more of its businesses to emerge from the growing automotive and consumer electronics verticals.

“This site enables us to tap into the excellent pool of local engineering talent, thereby strengthening our global R&D ecosystem and bringing us closer to the local electronics design market,” said Mr Kris Chellam, senior vice-president, global enterprise services, Xilinx, without indicating the investments for the new facility. Xilinx’s presence in India was hitherto restricted to a partnership presence established in 2004 with the Tata group-owned CMC Ltd.

The new facility will initially have 75 staff and can accommodate 300 employees over the next several years. Xilinx will manage and operate the centre which is responsible for the full product development lifecycle of Intellectual Property (IP) cores in the high-growth areas of automotive electronics, embedded processing and high-speed serial I/O connectivity. IP cores are pre-engineered, functional modules that reduce the development time of programmable system designs. In addition, the facility will provide design verification for IP cores and technical support for Xilinx customers.

Elaborating on the automotive and consumer electronics verticals focus, Mr Akshya Prakash, MD of Xilinx India said, “Not long ago, about 80 per cent of our revenues emanated from the wired and wireless segments in communication and defence segments, but now that figure is less than 50 per cent. In India, we are in talks with Tata Motors to contribute in the area of automotive research primarily with Controller Area Networks (CAN) that is used for display, safety and telematics in automobiles.” Globally, Xilinx has Ford, Bosch, Chrysler and Nippon as clients in the automotive space.

Additionally, Xilinx which has domain expertise in 65nm Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) IP cores, is testing the next generation 45nm FPGA that will be launched in 2007 for better performance advantage, Mr Prakash said adding that the company would also launch an Asia-Pacific venture capital fund in November with the sole aim of boosting R&D research.

New Delhi, Oct. 4: The petroleum ministry on Wednesday launched a new marker system to detect adulteration of kerosene in petrol and diesel. The adulteration of diesel and petrol with the marker-blended kerosene could be easily detected using a simple kit. Mr Deora said that the kit would be available in all the petrol pumps by the end of the year. “The test is simple and it is possible to visually detect even a small trace of kerosene in auto fuels using a simple but highly accurate and effective test kit,” said Mr Deora.

Mr Deora said that adulteration of kerosene with petrol and diesel is one of the major reason that people below poverty line (BPL) are not able to get kerosene for cooking and lighting purpose and this new marker will raise the level of monitoring of auto-fuels. The petroleum ministry, in consultation with law ministry, is also planning to amend the marketing guidelines to make it essential for the petrol and diesel dealers to allow the customer check the purity of the oil by using the kit. The ministry is also planning a mass awareness campaign to educate the masses about the new marker. “Within a week, we would announce the name of a celebrity who would campaign against auto fuel adulteration,” said a petroleum ministry official.

Kerosene, which is highly subsidised, is widely used to adulterate petrol and diesel because of the huge price difference. In September 2005, an NCAER study concluded that 38.6 per cent of PDS kerosene was being diverted for adulteration in petrol and diesel.

Under the system, kerosene would be dyed with an imported marker, which once induced in the adulterant (kerosene) cannot be removed or be tampered with. The marker would be imported from Authentix of UK. The marker system would help detect adulteration of kerosene in auto fuels and ensure that PDS kerosene reaches the targeted group.It was first in 1990 that the oil industry first introduced the blending of kerosene with furfural in order to detect adulteration of auto-fuels.

New Delhi, Oct. 4: Telecommunications and IT minister Dayanidhi Maran is understood to have sought Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s intervention for expediting the semi-conductor policy, saying the delay would affect the government’s credibility. In a communication to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) last week, the minister is understood to have sought intervention to expedite the policy, which was promised by finance minister P. Chidambaram in his Budget speech this year.

The last letter on the issue was written on September 27. Mr Chidambaram in his Budget speech had mentioned about the existing vehicles of viability gap funding and the India Infrastructure Finance Company. He had said this would be used to create a three-year facility to provide equity participation and viability gap funding to new ventures in the area of manufacture of semi-conductors and other high-tech IT products. Meanwhile, the internal committee consisting of various stakeholders and manufacturers have submitted their recommendations on the said policy.