Russian President Vladimir Putin, second left, shakes hands with Vietnamese officials upon his arrival at Noi Bai International Airport in Hanoi, on June 20, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AP

Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in Vietnam early on June 20 for talks with the country’s Communist leaders after concluding a defence pact with North Korea for his final stop on a two-nation tour of Asia.

Mr. Putin’s aircraft touched down at Hanoi’s international airport, where he was met on a red carpet by Vietnamese Deputy Prime Minister Tran Hong Ha, according to a Reuters witness.

In an opinion piece timed for his visit, Mr. Putin applauded the Southeast Asian Communist-ruled country for supporting “a pragmatic way to solve the crisis” in Ukraine, in comments published in Vietnam’s Communist Party newspaper.

Vietnam, which officially pursues a neutral foreign policy it calls “bamboo diplomacy” in its relations with world powers, has abstained from condemning Russia’s attack on Ukraine, a stance that Western countries view as too close to the Kremlin

The Southeast Asian country will be the third nation Mr. Putin has visited, after China and North Korea, since he was sworn in for a fifth term in May.

Vietnam has been gearing up for a full state welcome for Putin, his first visit since 2017 and his fifth in total.

As well as holding talks with Vietnam’s top leaders, Mr. Putin will attend wreath laying ceremonies including at the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, housing the embalmed corpse of Vietnam’s founding leader.

Moscow:

Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in Vietnam on Thursday morning for a state visit set to deepen ties between Moscow and Hanoi, Russian news agencies reported.

Travelling from a closely followed trip to North Korea, Putin touched down in the southeast Asian country with a large delegation of senior Russian ministers and business figures.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Vietnam’s Public Security Minister To Lam. File
| Photo Credit: AFP

Vietnam has nominated its Public Security Minister To Lam as its new president, state media said on May 18, after his predecessor resigned in the ongoing anti-corruption campaign that has shaken up the country’s political establishment.

The Communist Party’s Central Committee had agreed to the nomination of To Lam, a Politburo member, as President, state-run Vietnam News Agency reported. The nomination will likely be approved by Vietnam’s National Assembly during its next session on May 21.

Former President Vo Van Thuong resigned in March after a little over a year in the position. His predecessor had also resigned in 2023 while taking “political responsibility” for corruption scandals during the pandemic.

The anti-graft campaign is being led by Communist Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, 79, an ideologue who views graft as the gravest threat facing the party. The country’s most powerful politician has vowed that no one is untouchable in the so-called “blazing furnace” campaign.

Mr. Lam, who spent over four decades in the Ministry of Public Security before becoming the Minister in 2016, has been a key figure in the execution of anti-corruption measures.

The most recent high-profile resignation linked to the campaign was that of Vietnam’s Parliament head, Vuong Dinh Hue, in April. The current vice-speaker, Tran Thanh Man, has been appointed as Mr. Hue’s replacement.

Political instability can threaten economic ambitions, fear experts

The president and the head of Vietnam’s Parliament are among the top four political positions in the party and the resignations point to instability that analysts say could threaten Vietnam’s ambitions as it vies to become an alternative to China in the region’s supply chains.

Analysts say that rivals in the party were jostling to position themselves as a successor to Mr. Trong, who was elected to an unprecedented third term as party chief in 2021. Given his age, experts say that it is unlikely that he will continue for another term.

A farmer looking at his crop in a field in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta region, known as the country’s rice bowl’.
| Photo Credit: AFP

Vietnam faces nearly $3 billion a year in crop losses as more saltwater seeps into arable land, state media reported on March 17, citing new research.

The damage would likely centre on the Mekong Delta region, known as “Vietnam’s rice bowl” because it provides food and livelihoods for tens of millions of people, research from the country’s Environment Ministry showed.

Saltwater levels are often higher in the dry season but they are intensifying due to rising sea levels, droughts, tidal fluctuations, and a lack of upstream freshwater.

The resulting crop losses could amount to 70 trillion dong ($2.94 billion), state media VnExpress reported, citing new research from the Water Resources Science Institute, which is under the Environment Ministry.

The research presented at a conference on water resourse management on Friday, found that among the most impacted parts of the region would be the southernmost Ca Mau province, which could lose an estimated $665 million.

Earlier this month, the Department of Water Resources warned saline intrusion could impact around 80,000 hectares of rice and fruit farms in the Mekong Delta.

Salt intrusion in the area between 2023-2024 was higher than the average, according to the National Center for Hydro-Meteorological Forecasting.

The delta suffered an unusually long heatwave in February, leading to drought in several areas and low water levels in the region’s canals.

A farmer looking at his crop in a field in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta region, known as the country’s rice bowl’.
| Photo Credit: AFP

Vietnam faces nearly $3 billion a year in crop losses as more saltwater seeps into arable land, state media reported on March 17, citing new research.

The damage would likely centre on the Mekong Delta region, known as “Vietnam’s rice bowl” because it provides food and livelihoods for tens of millions of people, research from the country’s Environment Ministry showed.

Saltwater levels are often higher in the dry season but they are intensifying due to rising sea levels, droughts, tidal fluctuations, and a lack of upstream freshwater.

The resulting crop losses could amount to 70 trillion dong ($2.94 billion), state media VnExpress reported, citing new research from the Water Resources Science Institute, which is under the Environment Ministry.

The research presented at a conference on water resourse management on Friday, found that among the most impacted parts of the region would be the southernmost Ca Mau province, which could lose an estimated $665 million.

Earlier this month, the Department of Water Resources warned saline intrusion could impact around 80,000 hectares of rice and fruit farms in the Mekong Delta.

Salt intrusion in the area between 2023-2024 was higher than the average, according to the National Center for Hydro-Meteorological Forecasting.

The delta suffered an unusually long heatwave in February, leading to drought in several areas and low water levels in the region’s canals.

Hanoi, Vietnam:

Authorities in Vietnam are searching for nearly 100 drug users who escaped from an overcrowded state-owned rehabilitation centre in the Mekong Delta, state media said Monday. Vietnam has more than 30,000 drug addicts undergoing compulsory treatment at government facilities, some forced by law to spend up to two years inside.

Most detainees undergo cold-turkey treatment in overloaded centres and have in the past been subjected to solitary confinement if they break the rules.

Following an “internal dispute” on Saturday night, 191 addicts broke out of a rehab centre in the southern city of Soc Trang, reported Cong An Nhan Dan newspaper, the official police mouthpiece.

By Monday morning, 94 had been found and brought back. Police and families were searching for nearly 100 others still on the run, the paper said.

The addicts reportedly broke down the doors of their dormitory and escaped the centre via the main entrance and by jumping over the building’s iron fences.

Some detainees fled through a hole they had bored in one of the facility’s walls.

Several security guards were wounded after being attacked by the fugitives, the report added.

The centre’s infrastructure was poor, state media said, citing local officials.

It was also overcrowded, with just 60 guards in charge of the more than 460 drug addicts, mostly men.

Local officials refused to provide further details of the escape when contacted by AFP.

While Vietnam is experimenting with more community-based treatment options in response to criticism over its rehab centres, they remain the most-used form of recovery.

The centres are widely supported both by the government and public as a viable treatment option although addiction specialists say they don’t work and relapse rates are high.

According to the ministry of labour, invalids and social affairs, “more than half of these facilities do not have adequate infrastructure and equipment”.

Around 200 drug users escaped in 2018 from a rehab centre in the southern province of Tien Giang.

A year earlier, 100 people escaped from a centre in nearby Long An province because they were upset about spending the annual Tet new year holiday away from their homes.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Like with the last episode of Business Matters, this one too was triggered by a headline I saw in an article: “India fears losing out to China in smartphone exports race”.

This Reuters piece cited IT Minister of State Rajeev Chandrasekhar’s letter dated January 3 to Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman expressing fears that India’s high tariffs could be a deterrent to investments – investments that could help bolster our exports.

Why is India struggling to attract such investments? Let’s take a look at what competitors like Vietnam have done right in this space, which India too could, and potentially in quick time.

Mr. Chandrasekar’s missive to his colleague in the government emphasises the need for cutting back on tariffs. Lobbies for Apple and other electronic giants describe our tariffs as high and that the likes of China and Vietnam are more attractive for investors.

Given that firms from several western nations are looking to shift supply chains away from China, Vietnam and other East Asian nations seem poised to grab a good chunk of that pie, while India, despite its aspirations, has lagged.

And in the letter, he says, “The geopolitical realignment is forcing supply chains to shift out of China … We must act now, or they will shift to Vietnam, Mexico and Thailand.”

And sure enough, the change in trends is showing up in statistics. For the first time in 20 years, the US in 2023 imported more from Mexico than it did from China.

India would have liked to have been the one to topple China in that ranking but it did not.

The Reuters article cites U.S. Ambassador to India Eric Garcetti as having recently said that foreign investments were not flowing into India at the pace they should be, and were going to countries like Vietnam instead, because of the tariffs, especially on inputs, or in other words raw materials that go into making a whole product.

“If you tax inputs … you’re not protecting a market. What you are doing is limiting a market.”

So what can India do outpace a rival like Vietnam? After all, India has taken some steps around taxation and performance-linked incentives. In the Feb. 2019 Budget, India announced a 15% flat tax rate for new investments in manufacturing units. Its performance linked incentives have bolstered select sectors such as electronics but not all the others that the country wanted to spur.

In a recent article, Biswajit Dhar, Distinguished Professor, Centre for Social Development, New Delhi, said that the aim of the PLI scheme was to raise the share of the manufacturing sector in gross value added from 16% in 2014-15 to 25% by 2022 (PIB 2018). Instead, the share of the sector has declined to below 15%, he wrote.

In his piece, we read, “Industrial policy was successfully implemented in the East Asian region because the governments used a combination of policies to ‘accumulate physical and human capital, allocate this capital to highly productive investments and acquire and master technology to achieve rapid productivity growth’.”

In the video above, we spoke to Prof Dhar to understand exactly what others have done right and India hasn’t, yet. What emerged is that China, and the China model replicated by Vietnam, have shown that physical infrastructure thanks to which companies only need to come in and plug and play, human skills development and an ecosystem that has developed in tandem – such as railway connectivity and port reforms – alongside labour laws are critical to building investor confidence.

Did you know?

Exports accounted for only 25% of India’s smartphone production worth $44 billion last year, compared with 63% of China’s $270 billion worth of production and 95% of Vietnam’s $40 billion worth.

Last week’s quiz question

A small amount of inflation is good because it makes people buy items now rather than later to help save on expenditure, in the knowledge that costs will keep going up. This spurs consumption. As demand goes up, companies tend to produce more, invest more in manufacturing and hence create more jobs.

Deflation has the opposite effect. It makes people wait before spending, in the anticipation that prices could fall further. This lowers consumption, tempers demand. Companies then tend to produce less, invest less and there are fewer jobs created or worse, potential job loss. In the latter case, workers have even less to spend and this creates a vicious cycle.

Script and presentation: K. Bharat Kumar

Production: Shibu Narayan

“Kissing rocks”, a popular tourist spot in Vietnam’s Ha Long Bay, are at risk of collapse, according to a report. Released in July, the report said that rising sea levels and fishing boats travelling too close are causing the rocks to erode, as per a BBC report. The twin rocks rise out of the bay facing each other and appear to touch – or “kiss” – which makes them popular among tourists. The Ha Long Bay in Quang Ninh province is home to hundreds of such tiny islets, attracting four million tourists in 2019, as per the outlet.

The research on these rocks was carried out by Vietnam’s Institute of Geosciences and Mineral Resources. Ho Tien Chung, an expert working with the institute, said they observed one tourist boat stopping within just 19 metres of the islet.

There were also deep fissures, which make them prone to collapse.

“Tourists can see the rocks that are precarious at low tide,” the BBCquoted Ho Tien Chung as saying.

“The water level then is low, exposing the supporting foot of the rocks which are gradually being eroded, causing a risk of collapse if no measures are taken to protect and reinforce them soon,” the experts further said.

Straits Times said these rocks are around 1.39 metres tall, with the base more slender than the upper structure. Due to geological and tectonic movements, along with the influence of seawater levels, the rocks present as a single tilted structure with multiple fractures.

As an immediate measure, the experts from the institute have recommended limiting tourism activities and limiting the speed of boats passing through it.