The Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana (PMGKY) relief package, announced on March 27 to alleviate the distress of people most affected by the nationwide lockdown, may help whittle down some of the excess foodgrain stocks.

Among other measures, the report suggests that inheritance tax, which was abolished in 1985, should be brought back as this would reduce concentration of wealth, widen tax base and enhance revenue.

A finance ministry official said some other state governments have also shown interest in borrowing from their respective state CAMPA funds, but refused to name them.

Covid-19 is a new virus, whose behaviour is yet to be unravelled. Mutations cannot be ruled out. It is no one-stroke flattening of the curve.

Uttarakhand Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat said businesses should start operations in a phased manner, after taking precautionary measures.

Centre to stick to convention, transfer 70% of budgeted FY21 tax share of states in 10 months

The concern is genuine as new hotspots are emerging in districts like Idukki and Kottayam that were earlier in the green zone and considered safe.

According to a recent industry estimate, as many as 4.58 lakh housing units were facing delayed delivery across 1,509 stalled projects.

Hospitals were not keen earlier and considered using UV lamps in the HVAC systems only because there was a 10-15% savings in the electricity bill and not because it improved air quality and killed microbes, Kulkarni said.

Speaking at the Indian Express e-Adda from the US, Subramanian said that distribution of food and cash are the two key tools India should be using to help people tide over the crisis.

Tax experts said that in case Vodafone Idea is dissatisfied with the final scrutiny it can challenge the order but it would have to go through all the regular channels by first appealing in the income tax tribunal and then upwards.

Industry executives say the slump in electronics could only deepen in the first quarter of this fiscal, mainly due to the lockdown, and further accelerate a slide in the overall merchandise exports.

Interestingly, foreign portfolio investors (FPI), who were big sellers in March pulling out more than $8 billion, and have offloaded shares for most of April, turned buyers picking up some $50 million worth of stocks.

Jio's voice volume at 876,340 million minutes registered an increase of 6% compared to the preceding quarter. Usage per customer at 771 minutes, per month registered a rise of 1.4% sequentially.

“This is essential for maintaining the supply chain of goods and services across the country during the lockdown period,” Union home secretary Ajay Bhalla reiterated in a letter to state chief secretaries.

The company has also created an interesting new business vertical from this quarter - financial services - based on internal reorganisation of its business segments.

Many independent agencies have forecast that Indian economy may grow at less than 1% in FY21 from around 5% (advance estimate) in FY20.

States need to undertake to clear departmental dues, fast-track subsidy release to receive first tranche of Rs 45-k cr; show evidence of action to get the balance

Conglomerate hopes to become debt-free this year

To ensure safety, passengers would be screened by the sending states and only those found asymptomatic would be allowed to travel. Sending state governments will have to bring these persons in batches that can be accommodated in the train to the designated railway station in sanitised buses following social distancing norms and other precautions.

The myriad of options available means that users can choose their video calling platform according to their needs.

On Thursday, the expert committee set up by the state said 105 persons infected by the virus had died, but just 33 of these died due to the virus.

Social media use surges; average time spent on platforms like Facebook and Instagram up by over 60%.

Smartphone shipments set to decline 5-10% Y-o-Y in 2020; feature phones by 35-40%

The Indian Express will host its second online Express Adda with Dr Guleria, also internationally renowned pulmonologist, on Monday, May 4.

While praising the state on some counts, including increasing daily testing from 400 to 2,410 per day between April 20 and May 2, it also flagged the non-cooperation of the state bureaucracy.

A state-wise comparison shows that the states with the highest cases like Delhi, Maharashtra and Gujarat still seem to be doubling every 10 days.

SBI was working on a combination of reduced staff at office and providing 'work from home' facility, wherever it was possible.

While Maharashtra appears to be adequately equipped to handle the crisis, the report makes it clear the problem is that while the capacity is evenly spread across the state, the infection is mostly centred in Mumbai.

In an interview to India Today channel, the CEA said: “About $4 trillion of money tracks these (global) bond indices. India is expected to get a weight of around 1.5-3%. Even if you take 1.5%, that translates into $60 billion.”

Regular expressions are a powerful method for finding specific patterns in text. The syntax of regular expressions is intimidating, but once you've solved a few pattern-recognition problems with regex, you'll never go back to your old methods.

The post Convert a text-based measurement to a number in SAS appeared first on The SAS Dummy.

How we built a recommendation engine for new topics on communities.sas.com. We used data, machine learning, and DevOps to build a scoring engine with SAS.

The post Building a recommendation engine with SAS appeared first on The SAS Dummy.

News outlets share stats and graphs that they source from public data. It takes data literacy skills to critique the stats you see, and investigate more.

The post A skeptic's guide to statistics in the media appeared first on The SAS Dummy.

If you use Microsoft Teams for collaboration, you should use it for operational messages too. You can use SAS to automate tailored notices to your Teams Channel.

The post How to publish to a Microsoft Teams channel using SAS appeared first on The SAS Dummy.

If you use SAS macro variables in your programs (who doesn't?), then the SAS Macro Variable viewer is immensely useful to see current macro var values.

The post Viewing SAS macro variables in SAS Enterprise Guide appeared first on The SAS Dummy.

I'm a big fan of the Import Data task in SAS Enterprise Guide, especially for its support of text-based files (CSV, tab delimited, fixed width, and more). There's no faster method for generating SAS code that reads your data exactly the way you need it. I use the tool so [...]

The post Tricks for importing text files in SAS Enterprise Guide appeared first on The SAS Dummy.

If you have been using SAS for long, you have probably noticed that there is generally more than one way to do anything. (For an example, see my co-author Lora Delwiche’s blog about PROC SQL.) The Little SAS Book has long covered reading and writing Microsoft Excel files with the [...]

Accessing Excel files using LIBNAME XLSX was published on SAS Users.

SAS' Leonid Batkhan shows you how to automate creation of SAS variable labels so tables and reports are easier to read.

Automating SAS variable labels creation was published on SAS Users.

As a long-time SAS 9 programmer, I typically accomplish my data preparation tasks through some combination of the DATA Step, Proc SQL, Proc Transpose and some housekeeping procs like Proc Contents and Proc Datasets. With the introduction of SAS Viya, SAS released a new scripting language called CASL – a [...]

Challenge accepted: Learning data prep in CASL was published on SAS Users.

COVID-19 is truly a global health issue affecting everyone and causing concern for you, our customers. As we all continue to navigate the uncertainty of this outbreak, SAS is committed to supporting your business as a valued partner and will ensure continuity of service. We created this guide to address [...]

Frequently asked questions related to COVID-19 and SAS customer support was published on SAS Users.

Let’s be honest, there is a lot of SAS content available on the web. Sometimes it gets difficult to navigate through everything to find what you need, especially if you are looking for complimentary resources. Training budgets can be limited or already used for the year, but you’re still interested [...]

Tips and resources for making the most of your SAS experience was published on SAS Users.

Martin Mincey of SAS Technical Support shows you how to debug when listing registered SAS fonts, registering new fonts, getting SAS SG procedures to use a new font and more.

How to debug 5 common SAS® software font issues was published on SAS Users.

Whether you like it or not, Microsoft Excel is still a big hit in the data analysis world. From small to big customers, we still see fit for daily routines such as filtering, generating plots, calculating items on ad-hoc analysis or even running statistical models. Whenever I talk to customers, [...]

Extending Excel with Python and SAS Viya was published on SAS Users.

Common filters are filters that can be shared between objects in your reports. Common filter benefits include 1) Easy to assign the same filter conditions to other report objects, 2) When you edit a common filter, it is updated everywhere that the common filter is used, and 3) A common filter is available for the entire report, across pages.

Using common filters in SAS Visual Analytics was published on SAS Users.

Editor’s note: This is the third article in a series by Conor Hogan, a Solutions Architect at SAS, on SAS and database and storage options on cloud technologies. This article covers the SAS offerings available to connect to and interact with the various storage options available in Microsoft Azure. Access [...]

Storage in the Cloud – SAS and Azure was published on SAS Users.

Welcome to the first post for the Getting Started with Python Integration to SAS Viya series! With the popularity of the Python programming language for data analysis and SAS Viya's ability to integrate with Python, I thought, why not create tutorials for users integrating the two? To begin the series [...]

Getting Started with Python Integration to SAS® Viya® - Part 1 - Making a Connection was published on SAS Users.

SAS' Leonid Batkhan differentiates between SAS macro and programming languages, defines two types of SAS macros and much more.

How to create and use SAS macro functions was published on SAS Users.

With increasing interest in Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), many SAS Users want to know what can be done for Visual Analytics reports. In this article, I will explain how to use Python and SAS Viya REST APIs to extract a report from a SAS Viya environment and import it into another environment.

Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery – Using Python and REST APIs for SAS Visual Analytics reports was published on SAS Users.

In this edition of Problem Solvers, SAS Technical Support's Kathryn McLawhorn walks you through two PROC REPORT techniques.

Using STYLE/MERGE and STYLE/REPLACE in PROC REPORT was published on SAS Users.

Crypto may not work long-term as a currency, thanks to volatility and fraud concern issues. But the blockchain technology on which it relies might be here to stay