Indian Economy GK Questions with Answers – Page 32

At the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership summit held in Bangkok in November 2019, India announced that it would not join the agreement.

The India-UAE Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement was signed on 18 February 2022 and came into force on 1 May 2022, a gap of barely ten weeks that makes it one of the fastest agreements India has brought into operation.

The India-Mauritius Comprehensive Economic Cooperation and Partnership Agreement, or CECPA, took effect in 2021 and is the first trade agreement India concluded with any African country.

The European Free Trade Association has exactly four members today: Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland. Denmark was among the seven countries that set up EFTA in 1960, but it left to join the European Communities and is today a member of the European Union, not of EFTA.

TEPA was signed on 10 March 2024 in New Delhi with the four EFTA states, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland, and came into force on 1 October 2025.

India has no bilateral free trade agreement with Brazil. Its only preferential link with Brazil is through the limited India-MERCOSUR Preferential Trade Agreement, which covers a short list of products at reduced duty and is not a free trade agreement.

Under monopolistic competition a single firm faces a demand curve that is relatively elastic, so it slopes downward but is fairly flat.

Set up by the Finance Ministry after a decade in which stalled road and power concessions turned into bad loans, the Kelkar Committee reported in 2015 that risk had been pushed on to whoever would accept it rather than on to the party best able to manage it.

Infrastructure needs loans of twenty years or more, while a commercial bank takes deposits for a few years, and the mismatch between the two had crippled infrastructure lending after earlier development finance institutions were converted into banks.

Launched on 13 October 2021, PM Gati Shakti is an institutional answer to the old complaint that a road is dug up soon after it is laid because a pipeline or a cable was planned separately.

The National Monetisation Pipeline was released in August 2021 in two volumes, the second of which lists the assets ministry by ministry, with an aggregate monetisation potential of about six lakh crore rupees over four years from roads, power transmission, railways, pipelines, warehouses, stadiums and airports.

In an EPC contract the government owns the project, funds it from its own budget and simply buys construction services; the contractor is paid for the work done, keeps no operating responsibility and takes no revenue risk, so none of the defining features of a partnership is present.

Under TOT the authority bundles completed highway sections that have a proven traffic record and auctions the right to collect toll on them for a long concession, usually thirty years, against a single upfront payment.

It is the standing inter-ministerial committee that examines the concession agreement, the risk sharing and the financial structure of a central sector PPP proposal before approval, and its chair is the Secretary of the Department of Economic Affairs, with the secretaries of Expenditure, Legal Affairs, NITI Aayog and the sponsoring…

Viability Gap Funding is a one-time or deferred capital grant for a project that is economically necessary but commercially unviable, such as a rural road or a water supply line whose user charges can never repay the capital.

The Hybrid Annuity Model was adopted to revive road construction after both the toll and the annuity models ran into trouble.

The National Infrastructure Pipeline was announced in the Budget speech of 2019-20 and the task force under the Secretary, Department of Economic Affairs, drew it up for the five years from 2019-20 to 2024-25, with projected capital expenditure of about 111 lakh crore rupees.

The Reserve Bank asked banks in 2005 to offer a no-frills account with nil or very low minimum balance so that poor households would not be kept out by charges, and in 2012 the product was renamed the Basic Savings Bank Deposit Account, with a free debit card and a…

Regional Rural Banks were set up from 1975 on the recommendation of a working group chaired by M. Narasimham, to provide credit to small and marginal farmers, agricultural labourers and rural artisans, and the Regional Rural Banks Act followed in 1976.

The Aadhaar Enabled Payment System lets a customer withdraw or deposit cash, check a balance or transfer money at a micro ATM held by a business correspondent, identifying himself with the bank name, the Aadhaar number and a biometric such as a fingerprint, so neither a card nor a cheque…