The Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (Bhel) has bagged the national export award for outstanding performance during 1997-98. The award, instituted by the ministry of commerce, will be presented to Bhel by the Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee on Thursday. Bhel's export turnover during 1997-98, including deemed exports touched an all time high of Rs 1784 crore, up by nearly 38 per cent over the previous year. During the year, Bhel supplied gas turbines, generators and auxiliary equipment to various countries including Oman and Saudi Arabia, motors to France, Indonesia, Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh and surface condensers to Malaysia.

SEB finances need to be strengthened: Manmohan: Former finance minister Manmohan Singh was apprehensive of any rapid agricultural development as long as state electricity boards (SEBs) were in the red and rural administration weak. ``We need to strengthen the entire finances of SEBs as a lot of investments wererequired in rural electrification for faster agricultural development,'' Manmohan Singh told PTI in an interview. ``SEBs are bankrupt and hence their capacity to invest in rural electrification is limited,'' he said, adding a lot of attention needed to be paid to tackle soil erosion, water degradation problems for which the whole agricultural administration had to be toned up.

Parliamentary panel favours fibre-optic cable for Net, E-mail: Chairman of the Parlimentary standing committee on communications Somnath Chaterjee on Wednesday said the use of fibre optic cable (foc) was the only way to improve the efficiency and quality of value-added services like internet and e-mail. Speaking at a public grievance meeting along with other members of the committee in New Delhi, he said while the internet and e-mail services were being transmitted on an ISDN or a 64 kbp line to the telephone exchange in a majority of the areas, transmission between the exchange to the subscriber was only through an ordinarytelephone line. Consequently, the transmission quality and speed of the data were considerabaly affected as ordinary telephone lines to the consumer end did not have the same capacity as the fibre optic or ISDN line so as to carry the data with the same speed and quality, he added.

Move to prune items in zero-import duty to affect exports:Fieo: The Federation of Indian Exports (Fieo) said the proposed move to prune the list of items in the zero import duty category would affect exports adversely. Any move to dilute the benefits available under the EPCG scheme will result in a decline in production of quality products which will further aggravate the slowdown in export growth, Fieo president Navratan Samdria said in a statement in New Delhi. In fact, there is a need to make the EPCG scheme more attractive by bringing in additional sectors under the zero duty facility, he said. Samdria said the government should continue import of capital goods under the zero duty epcg scheme to help continuemodernisation and expansion efforts of exporting units.

Centre urged to pay greater attention to construction sector: The government should come out with a package in its budget to give a fillip to the construction sector, including according it industry status and extending some excise duty concessions for construction equipment, Disinvestment Commission chairman G V Ramakrishna said in Chennai on Wednesday. Delivering the key-note address at a function at which ISO 9001 certificate for human resource development was given to Larsen & Toubro's ECC construction group here, Ramakrishna said the government should pay greater attention to the construction industry, if it was serious about generating employment and upgrading infrastructure in the country.Ramakrishna, also chairman of the Construction Industry Development Council (CIDC), said the first thing the government should do was to grant industry status to construction. It should streamline the financing of the sector and consider giving exciseconcessions to construction equipment.

Centre promises to protect interest of sericulturists: The Government has proposed strict monitoring and inspection of silk imports as a measure to ensure that the imports did not hurt the interest of domestic growers and were done by only actual users. This was decided at a meeting of representatives of the Central Silk Board (CSB), the government of Karnataka and the ministries of textiles and commerce convened by commerce minister Ramakrishna Hegde, an official release said in New Delhi on Wednes. The meeting, also attended by textiles minister Kashiramrana, decided to have further discussions on the subject later this week. The Centre had convened the meeting following protests from silk growers, mainly from Karnataka, against the government decision to allow high grade silk import under SIL.