Posts by Neena Bhandari

Punjab National Bank opens office in Sydney

By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 17.09.2011 (IANS): Punjab National Bank (PNB), the second largest government-owned bank in India, opened a representative office in the heart of the central business district here on Thursday, becoming the fourth Indian bank to establish a presence in Australia.

“We are hoping to get regulatory approval from authorities in both countries to upgrade this representative office into a full-fledged branch within a year,” said chairman and managing director K R Kamath.

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Australian Red Cross campaigns to Make Nuclear Weapons the Target

By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 06.09.2011 (InDepth News Analysis – IDN): It was 7am on a fateful day in 1953, 10-year-old Yami Lester and a group of Aboriginal children were playing with a toy truck, when they heard a loud bang intercepted with several small bangs as the ground beneath their small feet shook.

“We saw a shiny black cloud coming from the south, moving above and through the trees, which spread across 70 miles. We shut our eyes as they began to burn. In the days that followed, about 50 Yankunytjatjara people in Walatina began to complain of skin rashes, sore eyes, vomiting, diarrhoea and coughing. There was no treatment on the cattle station. The closest health clinic was hundreds of miles away and we had no transport,” says Yami Lester, who was living160 km from Emu Junction in South Australia, the site of the first nuclear test on mainland Australia.

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Over many cups of tea, MJF built an empire that spans 101 countries

By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 03.09.2011 (The Business Times, Singapore): From a microcosm tea business, founder and patriarch Merrill Joseph Fernando has catapulted Dilmah tea to amongst the top eight brands in the world with his catchphrase `Single origin, 100 per cent pure Ceylon tea’, winning loyal consumers in 101 countries.

Come October and Dilmah will be capitalising on its `integrity, freshness and quality’ of tea to lure Singaporeans, aiming to exceed its sales by US$ 1.3 million by December-end and US$ 5 million in the next three to five years, capturing 15 per cent of the top-end tea market in the republic.

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