India scraps 20pc duty on onion exports from April 1

India yesterday announced the scrapping of 20 percent duty on onion export with effect from April 1.

The Department of Revenue issued a notification to this effect yesterday on the Department of Consumer Affairs' communication.The export duty was in place since September 13 last year.
As per the estimates of the Department of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, Rabi production of onion this year at 227 lakh tonnes was 18 percent higher than that of last year.
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X sues India govt over content regulation

To ensure domestic availability and discourage export of onion, the Indian government had imposed export duty, minimum export price (MEP), and export ban for almost five months from December 8, 2023 to May 3 last year.Despite the restrictions, India's total onion export during FY 2023-24 was 17.17 lakh tonnes and 11.65 lakh tonnes in FY 2024-25 (till March 18 this year), an official statement said.

The monthly onion export went up from 0.72 lakh tonnes in September, 2024 to 1.85 lakh tonnes in January this year, it added.

The decision to withdraw the export duty on onion export "stands as another testament to the government's commitment to ensuring remunerative prices to farmers while maintaining affordability of onion to consumers at this crucial juncture when both wholesale and retail prices have softened following the expected arrival of Rabi crops in good quantities," said the statement.

Elon Musk's social media platform X has filed a lawsuit against the Indian government over its use of takedown orders to request social media content be removed.

India, the world's biggest democracy, regularly ranks among the top five countries globally for the number of requests made by a government to remove social media content.X's new lawsuit marks the platform's latest challenge against the Indian government's censorship powers and comes as Musk's Starlink and Tesla prepare to enter the world's fifth-largest economy.

The case centres around the government's use of a key legal provision to issue blocking orders, which X alleges bypasses existing safeguards.

"According to X, this provision... is being misused to create an unlawful parallel mechanism for blocking information," Indian legal news website Bar and Bench reported on Thursday.

The case will be heard by an Indian court in the southern state of Karnataka on March 27, after a brief hearing early this week did not reach a conclusion.