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The Morning Wrap: Reality Check For PM Modi; Special Package From GST Council

Our selection of interesting news and opinion from the day's newspapers.
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The Morning Wrap is HuffPost India's selection of interesting news and opinion from the day's newspapers. Subscribe here to receive it in your inbox each weekday morning.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a speech on Wednesday assured the nation that all is well with the Indian economy, and that there was no reason to worry. But Vivek Kaul analyses the data to see if his claims live up to the reality.

The followers of Prime Minister Narendra Modi are praising him to the skies after a video of him — balling up a used tissue and putting it in his pocket after the aarti on Dusshera at New Delhi's Madhav Das park — went viral on social media. What does this say of our civic culture?

The outcry over the molestation of a woman student on campus at Banaras Hindu University has opened a can of worms. But in the long and sordid history of sexual violence at the institution, outlined by HuffPost India recently, the gangrape of a male student last year seldom comes into focus.

Pakistan's military has admitted that its Inter-Services Intelligence has links with "militants", an open secret of sorts, and justified the connection between the two as being a "positive" one. It has also clarified that it does not support terrorist organisations.

More than five weeks after India and China stepped back from a standoff at Doklam on the Sikkim border, Indian soldiers remain on high alert with around 1,000 Chinese troops still present on the plateau.

The Goods and Services Tax Council, chaired by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, is likely to announce a special package for micro, small and medium enterprises that will, among other things, address the concerns of exporters, as policymakers explore ways to fix the slowdown in economic growth.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi ended up elevating an economic feud to epic proportions, prompting one of his harshest critics Yashwant Sinha "to grab the quiver with glee and shoot armour-piercing arrows at two 'infamous' brothers", notes The Telegraph.

The slowdown in India's economic growth is an "aberration" mainly due to the temporary disruptions in preparation for the GST, the World Bank said today, pointing out that it will get corrected in the coming months.

After discussing Iran and North Korea with US military leaders on Thursday, President Donald Trump posed for a photo with them before dinner and called the moment, ominously, "the calm before the storm".

"India is at the confluence of two trends that are fundamentally challenging the world: The rise of Asia, with the growing importance of the Asian consumer, and digitisation," writes Janmejaya Sinha in The Indian Express, while making a case for a stronger bureaucracy.

The Hindu asks three voices from the Left, Right and the Centre if India needs a bullet train.

As winter sets in most of North India is wondering about how bad the pollution problem is going to get this year. Is it going to be any better this time? An editorial in the Hindustan Times doesn't sound exactly optimistic.

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This article exists as part of the online archive for HuffPost India, which closed in 2020. Some features are no longer enabled. If you have questions or concerns about this article, please contact indiasupport@huffpost.com.