Aadhaar has been touted as a game-changer in ensuring foolproof delivery of government benefits. But many glitches have been reported in the making of the card and what better proof than the glaring mistake in this year&rsquo;s wall calendar sent by the Press Information Bureau. The picture for the month of January shows a girl holding an Aadhaar card. The only problem is that the card she holds in her hand shows her name as Sabita Kumari &mdash; son of Parshad Lal.

Son-set clause

Business Standard

Consider the following discrepancies in the farm sector. The country is now the world&rsquo;s largest exporter of rice, a crop grown with huge quantities of scarce water and heavily subsidised fertilisers. At the same time, it is the leading importer of pulses, which require very little water to grow and fortify the land with nitrogen to reduce the fertiliser need even for the subsequent crops. Also, the government is sitting on mammoth foodgrain inventories worth over 66.5 million tonnes, three times the buffer requirement, even as the market prices of rice and wheat are high, hurting ordinary consumers. Furthermore, the annual production of cereals already exceeds the anticipated demand in the terminal year of the 12th Plan (2016-17). Yet the government continues to raise the minimum support prices (MSPs) and offer other incentives to ensure higher production of these cereals.

Balancing a diet

LinkedIn, the professional network, recently joined the 200-million user club. India, with 18 million members, comes a distant second after the US, which has 74 million members. Brazil and the UK are tied for the third spot with 11 million members each.

A 200 million member network

A job in senior positions in government usually tempts private sector professionals and economists because it adds significant heft to their resumes. When it comes to remuneration, however, a government job can by no means be considered a lucrative offer.

Pay-back and pay-offs

The Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC) clearly suffers from a severe shortage of proofreaders, if the spelling mistakes in one of its recent ad are anything to go by. Ajit Pawar was described as the Deputy &ldquo;Chef&rdquo; Minister and Minister of State for Industries Sachin Ahir&rsquo;s first name was spelt &ldquo;Sachine&rdquo;. Most importantly, Maharashtra appeared in one place as &ldquo;Maharashtera&rdquo;.

MIDC's spelling bee

Ordinarily, the government would have been happy to play up the announcement of a pilot scheme for dealer portability for LPG cylinder holders, since this answers a long-standing consumer demand. But Oil Minister M Veerappa Moily was visibly keen to keep the press conference as short as possible. The reason: he realised that the reason for the packed attendance was to question him on the impending diesel and LPG price rise and swamp the aam aadmi-friendly announcement. So instead of lingering to take questions and make comments on the sidelines, he spent about 15 minutes at the conference before leaving in a hurry.

Stop press

In &ldquo;Peacemaker&rsquo;s courage&rdquo; (January 12) Mihir S Sharma&rsquo;s core point that we must make peace with Pakistan is well taken, but he has not explained this in a way that can be understood by an Indian soldier or his family and friends.

Letters: No need for war

I admire the author of &ldquo;&hellip;As she is spoke&rdquo; (Worm&rsquo;s Eye View, January 12) for his insistence on the correct pronunciation of English words. It requires great competence and confidence to speak a language like English correctly. This is because in English words are not necessarily spoken the way they are spelt and have a set of rules each with several exceptions &mdash; whether it is a simple &ldquo;do&rdquo; or &ldquo;go&rdquo; or the complex &ldquo;psychology&rdquo; or &ldquo;Czar&rdquo;. For the uninitiated the problem is aggravated when it comes to proper nouns. How to verbalise &ldquo;Blanchard&rdquo; or &ldquo;Iacocca&rdquo; or Machiavelli or Freud? Moreover, in a big country like ours, with the dimensions of a continent in linguistic and geographical terms, inflection varies from state to state.

Letters: English or Iinglis?

A new price index for agri commodities: A Business Standard and Indicus Analytics initiative (Click on graphic)

Indicus price monitor

This refers to the debate &ldquo;Is UID-linked cash transfer a good idea?&rdquo; (January 10). With every passing day, more inadequacies in the direct cash transfer scheme are surfacing. Reportedly, the government had handed the electoral rolls in respective areas to public sector banks operating in the districts selected for the launch of the scheme, with instructions to ensure that every household has at least one bank account. One wonders about the reason for using electoral rolls, and not Aadhaar numbers. If the Centre&rsquo;s objective is transparency and fewer leakages in reaching the benefits to the poor, planning should start from the grass-roots level. Local bodies, revenue officials, bank offices and branches, cooperatives, non-banking financial companies and social organisations operating in respective areas should be taken on board while identifying the beneficiaries of the scheme.

Letters: UPA's last chance?

This refers to Barun Roy&rsquo;s article &ldquo;Honey, we&rsquo;ve shrunk China&rdquo; (January 10). China undoubtedly has made tremendous progress in road and rail transports but aping it will be disastrous for India&rsquo;s finances. Consider the distance and the time taken by our express trains between one metro and another &mdash; some take more than 24 hours. The travel time has not been reduced in the last 65 years. There are hundreds of century-old bridges that need to be rebuilt.

Letters: Don't ape China

Gold
Gold is headed for a 12th straight year of gains on rock-bottom interest rates, concerns on the financial stability of the Euro zone, and diversification by central banks into bullion(Click on graphics)
&nbsp;

Metals surge

Media kits and economic growth might not have a direct correlation but the quality of one could well be a reflection of the other, as journalists attending the last National Development Council meeting discovered. When the approach paper to the 12th Five-Year Plan (2012-13 to 2016-17) was finalised in October 2011, the average annual growth was pegged at nine to 9.5 per cent and the media kits were distributed in leather bags. By the time the Plan was finalised in December 2012, the growth target was lowered to eight per cent &mdash; and the media kits were distributed in plain jute bags.

Kitted out for growth

This refers to the editorial &ldquo;Look beyond govt funding&rdquo; (January 11). The decision to increase fees in Indian Institutes of Technology is justified. While the government may continue to support these high-quality institutions for their research and development activities, the remaining administrative and operational expenses must be met from the students&rsquo; fees. Only wherever necessary should the government subsidise the fee for deserving students.

Letters: Meet IITs' costs with fees

Why do Mahindra &amp; Mahindra (M&amp;M) joint ventures break up so frequently? Asked the question at a press briefing in Delhi, Pawan Goenka, M&amp;M&rsquo;s president, automotive division, couldn&rsquo;t provide an answer but he did say the group had earned itself a label, as he discovered during a recent visit to the US. &ldquo;I do not know if it&rsquo;s a good thing or a bad thing but we have been referred to as the Marilyn Monroe of Indian industry,&rdquo; he said tongue-in-cheek, adding, &ldquo;But in each of our tie-ups, we have parted ways amicably and both our former partners, Renault and Navistar, continue to support us in our operations.

'Marilyn' syndrome

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told the Indian Science Congress recently that issues like genetically modified (GM) foods cannot be settled by faith, fear or emotion, but by reason. This eminently sensible point of view must be taken to its logical conclusion, which means a review of the government&rsquo;s present anti-GM policies. Other recent developments, too, make such a review imperative. First, the Supreme Court last November turned down the plea made by its own-appointed technical panel to impose an interim ban on field trials of GM products. Instead, the court modified the composition of the committee and asked it to revisit its recommendations.

Reason, not fear

Estimates for India&rsquo;s industrial production were released by the Central Statistics Office of the ministry of statistics and programme implementation on Friday, revealing that the index of industrial production, or IIP, for November 2012 was 0.1 per cent lower than it had been for November 2011. The government responded by pointing out that festival dates can impact industrial production; in 2011 Diwali was in October, and in 2012 in November, meaning that there was a base effect to contend with. There is some truth to this observation; if industrial output in the two months of October and November 2012 is compared together with the same two months of the previous year, it is four per cent higher. Yet the contention that this inevitably reveals that the economy has bottomed out, and that government action is working, is highly debatable. The detailed figures reveal more than enough reasons for unease about those propositions.

Still in slowdown

As Table 1 shows, crude oil begins 2013 pretty much where it ended 2011. This is in spite of a dip in price in the middle of 2012 &mdash; a dip that Indian consumers did not receive full advantage of, because of the weak rupee.

StatsGuru: 14-January-2013

Every Monday, Business Standard analyses one family&rsquo;s finances and suggests a suitable way forward(Click on graphics)

Case study

In a second-hand car transaction, the seller is supposed to inform the regional transport office (RTO) within 14 days, whereas the car purchaser gets one month to intimate the RTO about the buy. Only then does the RTO record the transfer and change in ownership of the vehicle. In case the RTO delays the process, the buyer's claim against the car insurance cannot be rejected.

Tipping point

I had made a payment of Rs 70,000 to settle my credit card dues with a waiver of Rs 10,000 (interest). However, Cibil&rsquo;s records show the waiver as due. I plan to take a home loan and have got a no-due certificate from my bank. But the other banks I am approaching (as they offer better rates) are refusing me the loan.

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