Currency Swap Agreement with the central bank of Sri Lanka

Proposal to permit Reserve Bank of India to enter into Currency Swap Agreement with the central bank of Sri Lanka

The Union Cabinet chaired by the Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi, today gave its ex-post-facto approval for entering into an agreement with the Central Bank of Sri Lanka for extending US$1.1 billion as a special /ad-hoc swap outside the Framework on Currency Swap Arrangement for SAARC Member Countries.


India has a Framework on Currency Swap Arrangement for SAARC Member Countries since 2012. The facility is available to all SAARC member countries with a floor of US $100 million and ceiling of US $ 400 million within overall limit of US$ 2 billion and is valid till November 14, 2015. RBI in their letter dated February 18, 2015 has proposed to make available US$400 million to Sri Lanka under this Framework and the remaining US$1.1 billion as a special/ad-hoc swap facility outside the Framework, but with the same terms and conditions, for 6 months against the request of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka.

This will help Sri Lanka in availing a safety net against the probable volatility of their currency and provide short-term liquidity that would contribute to Sri Lanka’s economic recovery. This will also strengthen India’s bilateral relations and economic ties with Sri Lanka.

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Central Board Of Excise and Customs Awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Excellence in Public Administration for 2012-13

Minister’s Award for Excellence in Public Administration for the year 2012-13. These awards are given to acknowledge, recognize and reward the extraordinary and innovative work done by officers of the Central and State Governments for outstanding and exemplary performance, initiatives and projects whose qualitative and quantitative outcomes/results are of a very high order, and which have benefited a large number of citizens/stakeholders. Thrust areas for nominations include Introduction and implementation of innovative schemes/projects, bringing perceptible improvements in systems and building up institutions and making public delivery systems efficient and corruption- free.

This award, received by Chairman CBEC Shri Kaushal Srivastava from Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi, has been given for CBEC’s Information Technology Consolidation Initiative in the category of ‘Organisation’. The Directorate of Systems, CBEC, has implemented a consolidated IT infrastructure which has enabled CBEC to host all its e-services for taxpayers and other external stakeholders across Customs, Central Excise and Service Tax from central data centres. The key outcomes of the project are enhanced service delivery to taxpayers, transparency, increased efficiency and advanced analytics based decision support system through its Enterprise Data Warehouse project.

Using this infrastructure, CBEC on an annual basis gets on an average more than 1 crore Customs documents and thirty five lakh Central Excise and Service Tax returns filed electronically by a registered taxpayer’s base which is more than 25 lakhs. This infrastructure has also enabled stakeholder facilitation services like online Registration, e-payment of duties, reimbursement of drawback claims and document tracking etc. This project, implemented at a cost of approximately Rs. Hundred (100) Crores per year, has enabled CBEC to collect more than Rs. Five (5) Lakh Crores per year in taxes. The same infrastructure hosts CBEC’s e-commerce portals www.icegate.gov.in and www.aces.gov.in as also CBEC’s website www.cbec.gov.in which get a total of about 3 billion hits annually. CBEC has its own email domain webmail.icegate.gov.in which is also hosted on this infrastructure and it supports more than one lakh emails daily for the trade partners and departmental users. CBEC also has a disaster recovery capability for its critical IT services.

This project was certified in 2011 for compliance to the ISO 27001:2005 standard for Information Security by STQC, a body under the Ministry of Information & Communications Technology.

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The Ministry of Information & Broadcasting gets ISO 9001:2008 Certification

British Standard Institute (BSI) has conferred the certificate of registration to Ministry of Information & Broadcasting for the Quality Management System as per the requirement of ISO 9001:2008 in respect of various permissions / licenses issued by the Ministry for the broadcasting, print and films sectors. These include permission / license for satellite television channels, teleports, multi-system operators, community radio stations, direct-to-home services, publication of Indian editions of foreign, technical and scientific foreign magazines of news and current affairs sector and facsimile edition of foreign newspapers and grant of permission for foreign film producers.

The Ministry has been taking several initiatives to bring in more transparency and efficiency in the processes relating to grant of various permissions / licenses to the eligible applicants. The Ministry has put in place a well defined procedure and measures for ensuring quality of services offered to the customers on the basis of ISO 9001:2008. This will ensure delivery of services by the Ministry in a qualitative manner.

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Top Level Vacancies

The following posts of Secretaries in the Government of India are vacant at present:-

i. Secretary (Official Language)

ii. Secretary (Fertilizers)

iii. Secretary (National Commission for Scheduled Tribes)

iv. Director General, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research-cum-Secretary (Department of Scientific and Industrial Research)

v. Director General, Defence Research & Development Organisation-cum-Secretary (Department of Defence Research and Development)

vi. Director General, Indian Council of Medical Research-cum-Secretary (Department of Health Research)

Post of Secretaries falling vacant and filling of the vacant posts is an ongoing exercise. Necessary process has been initiated for expediting filling up of these posts as per the post specific extant procedure.

This was stated by the Minister of State for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions and Minister of State in the Prime Minister’s Office Dr. Jitendra Singh in a written reply to a question by Shri M.K. Raghavan in the Lok Sabha today.

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SC/ST Secretary Level Officers

There are 73 posts of Secretary to Government of India under Central Staffing Scheme. There is no Secretary level post in Public Sector Undertakings.

There are 04 SC and 02 ST officers presently holding the posts of Secretary to the Government of India under the Central Staffing Scheme. There is no provision of reservation in these posts. Every effort is however, made at the time to empanelment to provide representation to these officers, if necessary even by adopting more liberal yardsticks/benchmarks for empanelment in their cases.

This was stated by the Minister of State for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions and Minister of State in the Prime Minister’s Office Dr. Jitendra Singh in a written reply to a question by Shri Sher Singh Ghubaya and Shri Harinarayan Rajbhar in the Lok Sabha today.

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Vacancies in Scientific Agencies

At present, the posts of Director General/Head of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR); Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR); Defence Research & Development Organization (DRDO); Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advance Scientific Research (JNCASR); and Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) are vacant with effect from the dates shown against each:



Name of Post                          Date of vacancy



DG, CSIR                              01.01.2014

DG, ICMR                             01.03.2015

DG, DRDO                            01.02.2015

President, JNCASR                01.10.2013

Director, IARI                        07.08.2014



Necessary steps have been initiated for expeditious selection of regular incumbents to these posts inter alia including advertisement inviting applications, constitution of Search-cum-Selection Committee, etc. as per the post-specific extant procedure.



This was stated by the Minister of State for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions and Minister of State in the Prime Minister’s Office Dr. Jitendra Singh in a written reply to a question by Dr. Shashi Tharoor in the Lok Sabha today.

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Submission of Fake Caste Certificates

Information about appointments secured on the basis of fake/false caste certificates is not centrally maintained.

However, the Central Government had undertaken a one-time exercise to collect information about appointments secured on the basis of fake/false caste certificates in the year 2010. As per information received from various Ministries/Departments etc. 1832 appointments were allegedly secured on the basis of fake/false caste certificates. Disciplinary proceedings had been instituted in all the cases. It was reported that out of the above 1832 cases, 276 had resulted in suspension/removal etc, whereas 521 cases were entangled into litigations and in remaining 1035 cases disciplinary proceedings were pending.

The Government instructions provide that an appointing authority should verify the caste status of SC/ST/OBC candidates at the time of initial appointment as well as at the time of promotion.

Chief Secretaries of States/Union Territories have been requested to issue instructions to the District Magistrates/ District Collectors/ Deputy Commissioners of the Districts to the effect that when asked to verify the veracity etc. of caste certificates, they should ensure at their own level that veracity of the caste/community certificate referred to the district authorities is verified and reported to the appointing authority within one month of receipt of request from such authority. In order to rule out collusion between candidates holding false/forged certificate and employees at the district level or sub-district level, disciplinary proceedings may be initiated against officers who default in timely verification of caste status in such cases or issue false certificates.

This was stated by the Minister of State for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions and Minister of State in the Prime Minister’s Office Dr. Jitendra Singh in a written reply to a question by Shri Rattan Lal Kataria in the Lok Sabha today.

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Bio-Metric Attendance

The Government has decided to use an AADHAR Enabled Bio-metric Attendance System (AEBAS) in all offices of the Central Government, including attached / sub-ordinate Offices, in India as an enabling platform for marking of attendance.



As per the information collected, the status of implementation of the AEBAS in Central Government Offices in Delhi is as follows:

No of organizations where employees are marking their attendance	No of organizations where employees are registered but not started marking their attendance	No of organizations on boarded but yet to complete formalities for employees registration	Total
312	93	100	505

National Informatics Centre has incurred an expenditure of Rs. 4.8 crores in procuring and installing the front end devices like Wall mounted Biometric Terminals, desktop based finger print and Iris scanners, etc. for the above offices. Installation is part of the cost of procurement.



This was stated by the Minister of State for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions and Minister of State in the Prime Minister’s Office Dr. Jitendra Singh in a written reply to a question by Shri Jose K.Mani in the Lok Sabha today.

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