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Finance Minister Arun Jaitley will embark on a 10-day US visit beginning June 16, during which he will meet US Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, foreign institutional investors (FIIs) and business leaders.
He will travel to New York, Washington and San Francisco during the visi, ending on June 25.
During the New York visit, Jaitley will interact with officials of the New York Stock Exchange, meet FIIs and address students of two US institutes.
In Washington, he is scheduled to meet Lew. In San Francisco, he will hold a round-table discussion with the members of the US-India Business Council, sources said.
That apart, Jaitley has been assuring investors of a non-adversarial tax regime, saying the government has no intention to tax people retrospectively and will make it easier to do business in the country.
What's on PM's agenda for International Yoga Day?
June 21 is International Yoga Day, so declared after Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged the UN General Assembly to adopt yoga as a way to de-stress the world. The PM will perform yoga on the Raj Path in Delhi. What asana will he choose? Or will he only speak to the people there? How will the function be structured? Sunday will bring the answers - in an exercise that will harness India's soft power in a way not seen since the 1960s when the world discovered Ravi Shankar.
Interestingly, yoga has been endorsed by U T Khader, the Karnataka health minister and a Muslim. Khader says "I am a health minister first. My opinion is health, education and food are above religion. Thus I consider this (yoga) as an exercise and there is nothing wrong in doing exercises. What assumptions our religious leaders have about yoga, it is the duty of the government to clarify it." Karnataka has a Congress government.
Patna IIT inauguration set to kick off Bihar poll campaign
The campaign for the Bihar Assembly election has already begun, with Lalu Prasad agreeing to swallow a bitter pill for seamless seat adjustment with Nitish Kumar and the Congress. The official go-ahead to the campaign will be given around the end of June, maybe June 30, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi goes to Patna with a bagful of goodies including inaugurating an IIT campus. That should make for an interesting photo-op with Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who has repeatedly highlighted factual mistakes in Modi's knowledge of history and geography, flanking him as he inaugurates a premier educational institution. Every comma and full stop on the speeches made on that occasion will be parsed by the voting population of Patna.
Rahul to visit Chhattisgarh conflict zones
Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi will start a two-day tour of Chhattisgarh from June 15, with a focus on meeting the farmers affected by the coal mines and power projects in Korba and Janjgir-Champa districts.
His visit will start from Kudmura village in Korba district, which is a man-animal conflict zone. The villagers have been facing an elephant menace. An elephant reserve proposed in the area could not take shape as the pocket is endowed with rich coal reserves. He will later visit Madanpur, the epicentre of the protest going on against a coal mine operated by the Adani Group. Gandhi will also talk to locals in the region that comes under the Hasdeo-Arand coalfields. The function in Madanpur had been organised under the banner of Hasdeo-Arand Bachao Sangharsh Samiti.
