Ranjan Varma has started Rupee Camp which is a personal finance workshop meant to be a structured program to provide people with money skills. I’ve obviously not attended this so I don’t know how good it is but I do like Ranjan’s blog, so I thought I’d let OneMint readers know about his initiative. The workshop will be held in Mumbai and the cost is Rs. 3,000. If you are interested in this kind of thing then head over to his blog and check it out.
On to some news now – first up – India abstained from voting for use of force in Libya. India was not alone in this as BRIC + Germany also abstained.
From what I can understand the reasons for abstaining is that information coming out of Libya is not credible, and there isn’t enough clarity on who will do what once the resolution is carried out.
On a totally different note India imported $623 million worth of oil from Libya last year, and about $17 billion dollars worth of oil from Saudi Arabia. The numbers are probably not directly comparable because of the high quality of sweet crude that Libya produces.
On to some more national news – the Indian government has armed itself with an internet kill switch or the power to shut off the internet under the IT Act of 2008. This is quite ridiculous not only because it is against the very idea of our democracy, but also because it doesn’t sound practical at all.
RBI raised the repo and reverse repo by 25 basis points or 0.25% this week, and their guidance indicates that more hikes can be expected in the future. Earlier this week I tweeted out that Repo is the rate at which liquidity is injected and reverse repo is the rate at which it is absorbed by the RBI, and that might be a short and useful thing to remember as these terms are used more frequently in the future.
Have a good weekend!
