BHUBANESWAR l Saturday l august 06, 2022 l `9.00 l PAGES 12 l JEYPORE EDITION PDP, Cong seek rollback on 3rd anniv of hollowing 370 88% drop in law & order incidents: police The two parties held protest marches on Friday to mark the third anniversary of the repeal of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status Solve Kashmir dispute via talks: China Law and order incidents dropped 88% in three years since the revocation of the erstwhile state’s special status compared to the preceding three years, police said. From August 5, 2016 to August 4, 2019, the Valley witnessed 3,686 law and order incidents, which came down to 438 since August 5, 2019 when the Centre bifurcated it into two Union territories ■ ■ While Pakistan is reportedly using its embassies in West Asia and Europe to keep the Kashmir issue alive, China said New Delhi and Islamabad should resolve disputes through dialogue “This is an issue leftover from history,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying | P8 930 Terror incidents during 2016-2019. This dropped to 617 in the next 3 yrs CHENNAI ■ MADURAI ■ VIJAYAWADA ■ BENGALURU ■ KOCHI ■ HYDERABAD ■ VISAKHAPATNAM ■ COIMBATORE ■ KOZHIKODE ■ THIRUVANANTHAPURAM ■ BELAGAVI ■ BHUBANESWAR ■ SHIVAMOgGA ■ MANGALURU ■ TIRUPATI ■ TIRUCHY ■ TIRUNELVELI ■ SAMBALPUR ■ HUBBALLI ■ DHARMAPURI ■ KOTTAYAM ■ KANNUR ■ VILLUPURAM ■ KOLLAM ■ TADEPALLIGUDEM ■ NAGAPATTINAM ■ THRISSUR ■ KALABURAGI RBI signals end of cheap loans era M O N I K A YA D A V @ New Delhi LOANS are all set to become more expensive with the Reserve Bank of India on Friday increasing the repo rate (at which it lends money to commercial banks) by 0.5% to 5.4% with immediate effect. Home and car loans, which are linked to repo rates, will feel the pinch immediately as the transmission of RBI rate action is instant in such cases. The interest rates are already around 7.55% for borrowers with high credit scores. With the latest hike, it could go past 8%. That will be a substantial increase considering that in the beginning of the year, home loan rates were just 6.65%. ICICI Bank and Punjab National Bank have already raised their lending rates after the central bank increased the benchmark interest rate on Friday . Y Viswanatha Gowd, MD & CEO of LIC Housing Finance, said the repo rate hike will cause some fluctuation in the EMIs or the tenure on the home loans but the de- mand for housing is likely to remain robust. A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows the EMI on a `50-lakh loan with 20-year tenure will now increase by `1,518. On the positive side, those with fixed deposits in banks will gain as their rates will also go up albeit slowly. At present, fixed deposit rates of one-year tenure range from 5.6% to 6.3%. RBI has so far raised the repo rate by a total of 1.4% since May . With the latest hike, it has reversed the Covid-era cuts completely. The present repo rate at 5.25% is higher than the pre-Covid level of 5.15%. Justifying the hike, RBI governor Shaktikanta Das said the regulator was forced to act as inflation remained at “unacceptably high levels”. RBI retained its inflation outlook for the current fiscal at 6.7%, while the regulator is mandated to keep it under 6%. Das said India’s economy is improving driven revival in urban demand. RBI pegs FY23 GDP P10 growth at 7.2%.  Banks can’t rely on RBI money forever: Das RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das said on Friday that banks cannot “perennially” rely on the central bank’s money to support credit offtake and they need to mobilise more deposits to aid credit growth Gandhis among 300+ detained after protest E x p r e s s N e w s Se r v i c e @ New Delhi Congress leaders Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra led a strong nationwide protest from the front against price rise, GST on essential items and unemployment, with the latter catching the eye as she climbed over barricades and sat on the road outside the AICC office. Both were among the 300-plus who were detained by the police for over six hours. Rahul set the ball rolling by tearing into the government, saying the country is witnessing is “death of democracy”. “The government wants that people’s issues should not be raised and is working for the benefit of 4-5 big businessmen. All institutions in the country are under the control of the BJP and RSS. Despite all this, the Opposition is making efforts to fight against the government,” he said. Dressed in black as a mark of protest, Congress MPs marched towards Rashtrapati Bhavan from Parliament House. They were stopped at Vijay Chowk by the police in view of the security protocol. The leaders then sat in protest at Vijay Chowk. Priyanka and other senior leaders, including Rajasthan No immunity in criminal cases: Naidu E x p r e s s N e w s Se r v i c e @Bhubaneswar MPs have no immunity from arrest in criminal cases during Parliament session, Rajya Sabha Chairman Venkaiah Naidu said on Friday Their ministers cannot see the price rise, so we wanted to walk to PM’s house and show him the high inflation, show him the gas cylinder the price of which is sky high Priyanka Gandhi Vadra PPT engineer, 3 others held in bribery case Priyanka Gandhi Vadra crossing police barricades during a protest march, in New Delhi on Friday | Shekhar Yadav Standing for democracy “The more I raise people’s issues, the more I will be under attack from the government but I will continue to stand for democracy,” Rahul Gandhi told the media Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot, were stopped outside Congress headquarters at 24, Akbar Road while they were marching towards the Prime Minister’s residence. After Priyanka squatted on the road, she was pulled into the police van and detained along with others. “The government thinks it can silence us. It thinks that by showing us this force, it can make us quietly sit in buses but we have a purpose,” Priyanka told reporters. The detained leaders were taken to Kingsway Camp in GTB Nagar and were later released. The area around the Congress HQ was cordoned off since Wednesday and a large police force deployed. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Friday arrested the chief mechanical engineer of Paradip Port Trust (PPT) and three others, including a senior executive of a stevedoring firm, in an alleged bribery scandal. The arrested include the PPT engineer Saroj Kumar Das, his associate Sumanta Rout, manager, port operations of Kolkata-based KCT Group Sankha Subhra Mitra and DGM (operations) of Odisha Stevedores Limited (OSL) Surya Narayan Sahoo. Das has been accused of frequently demanding and receiving bribes for extending benefits to private parties engaged in services and activities in at the port. Rout acted as the middleman to collect the bribe money . Rout had also roped in manager, port operations, of Kolkata-based KCT Group Sankha Subhra Mitra for such activities. Mitra was reportedly acting as a middleman for other cargo companies. A CBI spokesperson said, the case related to serious financial irregularities in repair and replacement of a conveyor belt of Continued On P5 PPT.  China ends cooperation with US over Taiwan visit China said on Friday it was ending cooperation with the United States on a litany of key issues including military talks, as relations between the two superpowers nosedive over Taiwan | P9 E x p re s s re a d Army conducts Exercise Skylight New Delhi: Keeping the future warfare in mind, which the Indian Army feels will be dominated by technologies, the force has carried out “Exercise Skylight” for the first to ensure operational readiness of secure all satellite-based systems. The across the country exercise was conducted from July 24 to 29 | P7