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Business Standard analyses one family's finances and suggests a way forward

Case study

Business Standard

Business Standard brings you a snapshot of average current rates and unit sizes in localities that offer property in a price range of Rs 1.5-2 crore

Realty check

Social media is increasingly being used as a platform for brand promotions, especially by celebrity endorsers. Some stars have used it to pitch their films and even built themselves an online persona to match the characters they play on screen and the brands they back. The growing popularity of the medium has led to companies actively tracking the performance of their stars and their brands on social media, creating a whole new hierarchy among Bollywood's biggest brands

Social stars, celebrity brands

Columnist R Gopalakrishnan is right when he says that "what makes a vocation progressive or backward largely depends on how you do it rather than what you do" ("Intelligent farming", November 13)

Letters: Start-ups in farming

Apropos the editorial, "Chennai's floods" (November 19), the deluge in Tamil Nadu's capital city is believed to be the worst in a long time and has thrown life out of gear

Letters: Inept state machinery

With reference to Shyamal Majumdar's column, "The crisis in engineering education" (November 20), it is no secret that a significant number of IITians either join corporate management institutes or IAS

Letters: Need good faculty

Making remote working work

In addition to hard-nosed business evidence and drivers, firms are also looking at increasing flexible working to improve the health, well-being and productivity of workers. Sisty one per cent of senior managers and business owners globally report that the demand for better work:life balance by employees is pushing them to opt for flexible working hours

Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi advised Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi to seek knowledge from his mother Sonia Gandhi "so that he becomes a bit more wise"

Lessons from Sonia and Ramdev

Now, a shop in Kolkata is selling saris with Modi's face on it, and customers can't seem to have enough

Modi, now on saris

Journalists in Delhi look forward to the annual Diwali Milan organised by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)

Party time

India cannot afford another wasted Parliament session

Laws need debating

Seventh Pay Commission award will strain Centre's finances

Containing compensation

MLAs are convinced self-help is the best way to go

The pension gold mine

The Justice Ashok Mathur-headed panel went to various parts of the country - from Shillong to Mumbai to Port Blair

Sailing seven seas

Chairman of the Seventh Pay Commission  A K Mathur (right) submitted the 900-page report to Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, in New Delhi on Thursday

Recommended date of implementation is January 1, 2016

7th Pay panel report at a glance

Investment in exploration may finally take off

New energy regime

People travelling to Patna this week are finding it difficult to find accommodation in hotels, as the district administration has booked a large number of rooms for delegates attending Nitish Kumar's swearing-in ceremony as chief minister of Bihar at Patna's Gandhi Maidan today. Kumar's guests are being put up in five-star hotels Maurya and Chanakya; Union ministers and chief ministers of other states, along with senior bureaucrats, will stay at the state guest house; and the security personnel accompanying them are at the circuit house. Members of the Legislative Assembly, who don't have any other accommodation in the city, have been put up in Tier-II hotels. A busy weekend ahead for the city's hospitality sector.

Booked to capacity

While journalists battle informal gag orders on the release of information by some ministries, there is at least one Union minister who believes that the current crop of bureaucrats is more vocal than some of the ministers. Speaking at a media interaction, this key Union minister faced a volley of questions about the perceived "communication gap" in the National Democratic Alliance government. "There is no such thing," he retorted, adding the government was fortunate to have "cordial" and "media-friendly" bureaucrats. "Some of them speak more than I do with the press," the minister claimed.

Talking point

The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2015 is not a word; for the first time ever, it is a pictograph - officially called the 'Face with Tears of Joy' emoji. According to Oxford Dictionaries, there were other strong contenders from a range of fields, such as ad blocker, Brexit dark web and sharing economy, but the popular emoji was chosen as the 'word' that best reflected the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015.

Word of the year

With reference to Rahul Jacob's interview with Manish Sabharwal in 'Lunch with BS' (November 14), Sabharwal gives several good suggestions, but the one regarding the Pay Commission for civil servants to link salaries with performance is vague.Sabharwal's suggestion is not a new one - the Sixth Pay Commission had made a similar one. It had proposed to give 10 to 15 per cent of employees an additional three per cent pay. A team, which included an IIM professor, was asked to identify the parameters on which this three per cent additional pay should be based. All government departments were asked to rate the performance of an employee but they failed.The problem of identifying the targets scientifically cannot be minimised.  If, for example, in a tax department, the criteria consist of the number of assessments, seizures and anti-evasion activity, all such numbers can be manipulated. And all departments do not have the same type of jurisdiction. The present system of an annual confidential

Letters: Measuring performance

With reference to the well-timed editorial, "Reorganise, don't reshuffle" (November 18), there cannot be two opinions about the possible reasons for the Prime Minister Narendra Modi's likely move to reshuffle his cabinet. The most important reason could be to penalise non-performers and inject some young blood into the cabinet. However, it would be naive to think that the cabinet does not have good performers. Of course, a few ministers have been indifferent performers, more interested in raking up controversies than in doing their job.I fully endorse the editorial's view that if and when the PM decides to restructure his cabinet, he has to take into account its implications for the structural reform programme. Further, the matter of realignment of ministries into clusters of interrelated domains remains shrouded in mystery.One expects the PM will ensure that only people of impeccable reputation and who are experts in their fields are inducted into his cabinet. Of course, the political

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