FM to embark on 5-day official visit to three nations, to attend meeting of BRICS finance ministers
As part of her visit to Seville, Spain, the Finance Minister will attend the 4th International Conference on Financing for Development (FFD4) organised by the United Nations, and deliver a statement on behalf of India.
The minister will be leaving later in the day and will conclude her three-nation visit on July 5.
New Delhi, Jun 30 (PTI) Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will lead an Indian delegation to Spain, Portugal and Brazil to attend a host of events including the BRICS Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors Meeting (FMCBG).
She will also participate and deliver a keynote address at the International Business Forum Leadership Summit on 'From FFD4 Outcome to Implementation: Unlocking the Potential of Private Capital for Sustainable Development', in Seville, the finance ministry said in a statement.
On the sidelines of the FFD4, she will meet senior ministers from Germany, Peru and New Zealand, and President, European Investment Bank (EIB).
In her next leg, she will visit Lisbon, Portugal, where she is expected to have a bilateral meeting with the Minister of Finance, Portugal. Besides, she would interact with prominent investors and members of the Indian diaspora.
At Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the Finance Minister will address the 10th Annual Meeting of New Development Bank (NDB) as India's Governor and also attend the BRICS Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors Meeting (FMCBG), it said.
As part of the NDB meetings, Sitharaman will also deliver an address during the NDB Flagship Governors Seminar on 'Building a Premier Multilateral Development Bank for the Global South'.
On the sidelines of the NDB meetings, it said, she will hold bilateral meetings with her counterparts from Brazil, China, Indonesia and Russia.
BRICS is a grouping of five major emerging economies — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. PTI DP DRR
This report is auto-generated from PTI news service. ThePrint holds no responsibility for its content.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
India Today
33 minutes ago
- India Today
Vendetta Republic: Minorities, women, justice under siege in Yunus's Bangladesh
The brazen rape and public humiliation of a married Hindu woman in Bangladesh's Cumilla region on Thursday night has once again brought into sharp focus how insecure minorities are in the nation. The victim, a mother of two, whose husband works abroad, had gone to visit her parents when a neighbour broke into the house and raped her at others joined the rapist, a man called Mohammed Fazar Ali, they filmed the act and threatened to kill the woman and circulate the video on social media if she raised an alarm or complained to the police. But neighbours, both Hindus and Muslims, alerted by her cries for help, chased the rapist and his accomplices police have already arrested five, including Fazar Ali. But by then, however, a 50-second video of the woman, naked and desperately fighting the rapist, had made it to social media. Hopes of justice are slim as the victim is under pressure to withdraw the case - the accused is a top local leader of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. This incident came within a few days of a brutal attack on a Hindu barber, Paresh Chandra Shil, in the northern district of Lalmonirhat, by a mob led by a local Imam who alleged he had made blasphemous remarks about Prophet Muhammad. The local police, instead of protecting the victim, helped the Imam by booking 69-year-old Shil for hurting religious sentiments, who insists he made no remarks against the in the same week, authorities demolished a Durga temple in Dhaka's Khilkhet, on the grounds that it had been constructed on land belonging to the Bangladesh Railways. Indian protests against the demolition of the temple sparked strong reactions from the Muhammad Yunus-led interim insecureadvertisementThese incidents do point to a growing sense of acute insecurity amongst religious minorities. After the brutal assassination of Bangladesh Puja Udjapan Committee leader Bhabesh Chandra Roy in April, India had pointed to the 'systematic persecution' of minorities and appealed for a course correction. But Chinmoy Krishna Das, the ISKCON monk who first organised protests by Hindus in Bangladesh, remains in jail, unable to secure bail in the sedition case he's been implicated in. Calls for his release have fallen on deaf ears. Attacks on Buddhists and Hindus in Chittagong Hill Tracts have also multiplied since the interim government took charge last the Yunus administration is in persistent denial, with the chief advisor claiming that those Hindus attacked were victims of popular resentment because they were closely identified with the ousted Awami League. That is a blatant falsehood because neither the Cumilla woman nor Paresh Shil was affiliated with any violenceYunus presides over the most lawless period of contemporary Bangladesh. In the week that saw the brutal rape of the Hindu woman in Cumilla, two other cases of rape were reported from elsewhere in the men were sent to jail in Mymensingh for raping a 13-year-old girl. Local religious influentials tried to hush up the case by arbitration, but the police moved in after the girl's father filed a case alleging rape. The same week, the director of a local madrassa, Shakhawat Ullah, was arrested for the attempted rape of a 12-year-old girl in the female dormitory of the against women seem to be on the rise at a time when Islamist radicals, who strongly back the Yunus regime, have taken to the streets to oppose women's rights. They are calling for trashing a Women's Reform Commission report that recommended equal rights for women in matters of inheritance, divorce, property, and marriage. In a protest rally, Islamist radicals went through the obscene symbolic act of stripping a woman's effigy and beating it with radicals say the commission's report goes against 'Islamic values'. Yunus, who set up the commission, has conveniently gone quiet, frustrating activists who headed the clerics have forcibly stopped women from playing football in many parts of the country, upsetting national team players who won the South Asian championship for Bangladesh just a year Yunus took charge, Bangladesh has witnessed a frightening rise in 'mob justice'. These mobs, whipped into frenzy by Islamist radicals or Yunus's student-youth brigade, have stormed stores to prevent actresses from inaugurating them or attacked leading personalities associated with the Sheikh Hasina regime. Recently, a mob attacked the residence of former Chief Election Commissioner KM Nurul Huda and assaulted (and garlanded) him with shoes. Later, police arrested Huda in a case filed by the BNP over electoral irregularities. The mob got away justice' was also the demolition of 32, Dhanmondi in Dhaka, the house of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who led Bangladesh to independence in 1971. For two days, the army and police stood by as mobs of religious radicals and Yunus's youth brigade pulled down the museum installed in the historic building. One such student leader (now in Yunus's advisory council), Asif Mahmud Bhuiyan, was recently let off at the Dhaka airport after bullet magazines were found in his luggage while he was travelling to Morocco via Turkey. The incident was widely reported in the normally muzzled Bangladesh League under attackYunus is desperately trying to undermine the legacy of Mujibur Rahman and the 1971 independence war he spearheaded, as is evident from his government's decision to remove Rahman's picture from all currency notes. Replacing them with new currency has cost Bangladesh billions, but Yunus seems than 100 former ministers and senior leaders of the Awami League and tens of thousands of party activists are in jail, mostly on trumped-up charges. More than 20 Awami League leaders have died in jail under mysterious circumstances, and even lawyers representing Awami League members in cases have been jailed. All activities of the Awami League have been declared Yunus administration suspects the Awami League is trying to hit the ground under the cover of protesting against minority persecution and appears determined to prevent it. Islamist parties have always fumed at the minority support base of the Awami League, which gives the party a clear edge in one-fifth of the country's parliament seats. Islamist parties have always played the communal card and branded the Awami League 'a stooge of India', a card that Yunus is more than willing to use to keep the Awami League at bay and continue in power without having to face Nobel laureate's pitch for the restoration of democracy is ringing increasingly hollow amidst rising 'mob justice' and his reluctance to announce a definite roadmap for elections.(Subir Bhaumik is a former BBC and Reuters correspondent and author who has worked in Bangladesh as a senior editor with Ends(Views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author)Tune InMust Watch
&w=3840&q=100)
Business Standard
35 minutes ago
- Business Standard
June Manufacturing PMI rises to 14-month high of 58.4 on strong demand
India's manufacturing activity rose to 58.4 in June 2025, up from 57.6 in May, marking a 14-month high, the HSBC India Manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) showed, according to data compiled by S&P Global on Tuesday. Commenting on the growth, Chief India Economist at HSBC Pranjul Bhandari said, "Robust end-demand fuelled expansions in output, new orders, and job creation. To keep up with strong demand — particularly from international markets, as evidenced by the substantial rise in new export orders — Indian manufacturing firms had to tap deeper into their inventories, causing the stock of finished goods to continue shrinking. Finally, input prices moderated while average selling prices rose as some manufacturers passed on additional cost burdens to clients." Industrial production falls to nine-month low in April Meanwhile, India's industrial output grew by just 1.2 per cent in May, marking the slowest pace in nine months, government data showed on Monday. Electricity generation fell sharply by 5.8 per cent, dragged down by an early monsoon. This was the first contraction in nine months and the steepest since June 2020. Mining output also declined by 0.1 per cent, recording its second straight monthly fall. RBI cuts rate by 100 bps Between February and June, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has cut the policy repo rate by 100 basis points, bringing it down to 5.5 per cent, as inflation softened within the central bank's comfort zone. The rate cut came as a relief for borrowers, with expectations of lower EMIs on long-term loans, particularly benefiting homebuyers. The RBI has revised its retail inflation forecast for the current financial year to 3.7 per cent, down from its earlier projection of 4 per cent in April. Meanwhile, the central bank has retained its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth forecast at 6.5 per cent for 2025-26. The quarterly growth projections stand at 2.9 per cent for April–June, 3.4 per cent for July–September, 3.9 per cent for October–December, and 4.4 per cent for January–March. What is PMI? The PMI is an economic indicator of business activity within a sector. It tracks production levels, new orders, employment, supplier performance, and inventory, based on responses from purchasing managers. A reading over 50 shows expansion in the sector, while a reading below this mark indicates a contraction in the sector. A reading of 50 suggests no change in activity.
&w=3840&q=100)
Business Standard
38 minutes ago
- Business Standard
'Fadnavis' govt cancelled the decision': Athawale on Maha language policy
RPI chief Athawale's remarks come amid Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis' announcement to withdraw the resolution on the three-language policy on June 24 ANI Politics Union Minister Ramdas Athawale welcomed the Maharashtra government's decision to withdraw the three-language policy and said that the Devendra Fadnavis government cancelled the policy even before agitations took place. Speaking to the reporters on his visit to Raipur on Tuesday, Athawale said, "There was a controversy in Maharashtra regarding the three-language formula. Hindi has always been our national language, and we respect it, but some people argued that there is no need to teach any other language in Marathi schools. Marathi people took an opposing stance. However, Devendra Fadnavis' government hit a sixer and cancelled the decision to (mandatorily) use the Hindi language even before any agitation took place." RPI chief Athawale's remarks come amid Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis' announcement to withdraw the resolution on the three-language policy on June 24. The Maharashtra government came under fire on April 16, as it passed a resolution mandating Hindi as the compulsory third language in Marathi and English-medium schools. However, in response to the backlash, the government revised the policy on June 17 through an amended resolution, stating, "Hindi will be the third language. For those who want to learn another language, at least 20 willing students are required." On June 24, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis stated that the final decision regarding the three-language formula will be taken only after discussions with litterateurs, language experts, political leaders, and all other concerned parties, which has now led to the cancellation of both the resolutions and the formation of a committee under Narendra Jadhav. When asked about the Centre's decision to conduct a caste-based census, Athawale criticised Congress for not conducting one during their regime. Ramdas Athawale said, "Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Indian government have decided on the caste census, and this is a historic decision, as for many years it was demanded but was not conducted during Congress' rule. Rahul Gandhi was demanding it, but why did he not do it when his government was in power?" "The Parliamentary committee will begin its work. The percentage of each caste will be known. We will get to know, after the independence, how much a caste has developed in terms of employment, and (participation in) agriculture and industries. And this will help the government to support the (backward) castes," he told the reporters.
