This refers to Shyamal Majumdar&rsquo;s column &ldquo;Who will teach the teachers?&rdquo; (Human Factor, January 4). The poor quality of teachers is indeed a cause for serious concern. One possible solution that is being worked on at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay is the use of the internet to provide education. On its part, the government is trying to provide every child with a low-cost tablet computer. If interesting and good quality educational material can be developed and deployed on the internet, an equal opportunity for receiving quality education would be available to all children.

Letters: Shift to online learning

Business Standard

What explains the Indian political system&rsquo;s stunning inability to come out and clearly defend women&rsquo;s right to leave their home, navigate safe public places and go to work? A series of recent statements on women&rsquo;s rights from politicians and leaders, especially from those who owe their allegiance to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, deserved a firm counterpoint &mdash; both from those within the Sangh&rsquo;s affiliate, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), who believe in economic growth and modernisation, and from those members of the political class with no ties to the Sangh. A senior minister in the BJP&rsquo;s government in Madhya Pradesh, Kailash Vijayvargiya, declared that there was a &ldquo;Lakshman rekha&rdquo;, a line that women should not cross or else they would be subject to abduction, as Sita was in the Ramayana.

Women at work

December turned out to be a mixed bag for the country&rsquo;s car makers, throwing up confusing signals. Maruti Suzuki, the country&rsquo;s largest car maker, reported a six per cent rise in domestic sales during the month over December 2011. Mahindra &amp; Mahindra&rsquo;s sales were up 18 per cent. On the other hand, Hyundai, the second-largest car maker, saw sales drop almost 10 per cent. Tata Motors was down a staggering 51 per cent.

Waiting for the RBI?

An Indian corporate giant is now pushing its own credit cards to customers visiting their retail outlets. That&rsquo;s not news but the way they&rsquo;re going about it is intriguing. The credit card sales personnel are strategically placed (most often at the billing counter). They approach a customer with an innocuous question: &ldquo;Do you own a credit card?&rdquo;. If the customer says yes, hoping to shake them off, they will then hard-sell their card, suggesting you use it because it has more benefits. The real benefit is for the company: Gaining a customer who already owns a card makes it easier for the company to secure the details required for fulfiling know-your-customer norms as mandated by the banking regulator.

Piggyback selling

The top brass of State Bank of India (SBI) is working hard to sell auto loans to customers, even cutting processing fees &mdash; but the message, it seems, is not percolating down the organisation. Take, for example, the experience of a resident in Kharghar, Mumbai. He went to his nearest SBI branch for a car loan and was asked to go to the branch near his office in Taloja. After the harried customer went to the Taloja branch, he was asked to go back to Kharghar. When the customer went back to the Kharghar branch, he was then asked to go to the branch nearest to his company&rsquo;s headquarters, which was in another city. Clearly, SBI&rsquo;s ad campaign and all the efforts by the leadership are being wasted. The customer finally went to a private bank for the loan, even though it meant paying higher interest.

Car seva by SBI

Mumbai real estate prices never cease to surprise the city&rsquo;s residents, but they still retain the power to shock occasionally. Recently, one builder bought land from a slum dweller in central Mumbai at Rs 1 crore a room. The sweeper who owned it had been living in the slum for the past 40 years and has now resigned his job and returned to his village. No wonder Mumbai is called the city of gold.

Slumdog crorepati

This refers to the report &ldquo;Infra biggies queue up for largest PPP project&rdquo; (January 4). This is a huge step by the state towards making Mumbai an international financial centre. It will mean comfortable and quicker travel for the people &mdash; and a significant increase in labour productivity. Last week, The Economist observed that Mumbai&rsquo;s &ldquo;millions endure commutes that would qualify them for post-traumatic-stress counselling in rich countries, and that rush-hour trains get so crushed that a phone or pair of glasses carried in a breast pocket will smash under the pressure of bodies&rdquo;. Let us hope that the best of the state, railways and business resources are deployed in this project. The government should periodically inform the people about its progress &mdash; the period for which the private partner will receive the revenue, the approximate one-way fare, and so on.

Letters: India's maximum city

The editorial &ldquo;India&rsquo;s two futures&rdquo; (January 1) attempts to rationalise the behaviour of the six accused in the Delhi gang-rape case, and draw economic policy implications. No amount of deprivation &ndash; be it a broken family, unemployment or lack of security &ndash; can justify the brutality of their act. The write-up talks about the problem of unemployment suffered by the juvenile (one of the offenders) for many years. Such an attempt to theorise the crime tantamounts to trivialising studies of social sciences. There is also an urgent imperative to lower the upper age limit for juveniles from the present 18 years. This limit made sense in the yesteryears with dramatically different socio-economic milieu.

Letters: Rationalising crime

This refers to the editorial &ldquo;Time to reform wheat&rdquo; (January 3). For producers, the Union Cabinet&rsquo;s decision to raise the minimum support price (MSP) of wheat by merely Rs 65 per quintal is an act of mockery. In 2008-09, wheat MSP was increased from Rs 850 to Rs 1,000 (17.7 per cent) and from Rs 1,000 to Rs 1,100 (10.2 per cent) in 2009-10. The Centre&rsquo;s export target of 2.5 million tonnes may be achievable, given the Food Corporation of India&rsquo;s buffer stock of wheat is three times more than required. This may be the reason for the Centre&rsquo;s indifference to the needs of the farming community. The government is, indirectly, discouraging farming of wheat and rice, especially in the northern states. With the increasing agricultural produce cost, how will the farming community benefit by such a small rise in wheat MSP? The government should balance the cost borne by producers and prices paid by consumers.

Letters: Minimum support

India begins the new year with an increasingly weak external account. As Table 1 shows, the current account deficit has steadily weakened since the pre-crisis year of 2007 &mdash; in fact, in the latest figures, it has dipped below 5 per cent of gross domestic product. As Table 2 demonstrates, this is thanks to a weakening balance of trade. Meanwhile, foreign exchange reserves, as Table 3 lays out, have not increased to match India&rsquo;s greater vulnerability.

StatsGuru: 7-January-2013

This refers to Kanika Datta&rsquo;s interview with author Zareer Masani &ldquo;Macaulay&rsquo;s &lsquo;child&rsquo;&rdquo; (Dinner with BS, January 1). The article covers some interesting issues. Masani&rsquo;s observation that &ldquo;English teaching is terrible&rdquo; in India is right. The progress of a language in a foreign country depends on the pedagogy used in teaching, public usage, clarity-richness of the language in nuancing subtle differences in meaning with precision and its capacity for inventing new words to meet contemporary needs. While Wren&rsquo;s grammar is still being taught in schools as also when I went school in the forties, emphasis has shifted from rigidity to convenience of usage. Earlier, the rule required use of apostrophe to show the possessive case of an animate noun only; so to call &ldquo;Tom&rsquo;s shirt&rdquo; was correct but &ldquo;shirt&rsquo;s colour&rdquo; was not. Not nowadays.

Letters: English, not vinglish

My father, 63, is a cardiac patient; he suffered his first heart attack three years ago.

General Insurance: K K Mishra

Finance Minister P Chidambaram&rsquo;s efforts to convince the opposition on the merits of a higher foreign direct investment limit (FDI) in insurance and pension have not yielded any results. The finance minister, however, has put the blame squarely on the media for its failure to highlight FDI and foreign institutional investor (FII) inflows as important instruments for financing the current account deficit. &ldquo;My regret is I haven&rsquo;t seen a debate in the papers in FDI and FII. It is always some ideological debate. I&rsquo;m putting the ball in your court to discuss these issues,&rdquo; he said.

FDI: Over to the media

Even though Financial Services Secretary D K Mittal formally announced Urjit Patel&rsquo;s name as the successor to Subir Gokarn as deputy governor in the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Friday, Gokarn&rsquo;s name continued to appear in the list of top executives&rsquo; speaking engagements on the RBI&rsquo;s website for the week December 31-January 6. This even though his one-month extension ended on December 31.

Telling inclusion

After witnessing the face-off at the Competition Appellate Tribunal between Ajay Devgn and Yash Raj Films over the latter releasing Shah Rukh-starrer Jab Tak Hai Jaan on the same day as the former&rsquo;s Son of Sardaar, the Competition Commission of India (CCI) may receive another application from a film personality. This time, it could be Kamal Haasan (pictured). The south Indian superstar is unhappy with the protest by Tamil Nadu Theatre Owners Association and the Confederation of Theatre Owners and Distributors Associations against his plans to release his movie Viswaroopam on DTH (direct-to-home) platforms. The actor-director hinted that if rubbed the wrong way, he may approach the competition watchdog. &ldquo;I consider them (theatre owners) my family, so I have not complained anywhere. But CCI is watching,&rdquo; he said on Friday in Mumbai.

Haasan's CCI threat

A new price index for agri commodities; a Business Standard and Indicus Analytics initiative(Click on graphics)

Indicus price monitor

The goals articulated in the Centre&rsquo;s new Science, Technology and Innovation Policy (STI 2013) are both ambitious and unexceptionable. STI is key to addressing a host of issues concerning energy and food security, nutrition, health care, environment, water, sanitation and, ultimately, employment generation. The policy paradigm is to be &ldquo;inclusive innovation&rdquo;, where STI furthers the aims of faster, inclusive and sustainable growth. STI integration is also the bedrock of the National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) and the policy seeks to support STI-led services for increasing transparency in government functioning. Specific time-bound goals have been set. The prime minister, addressing the Indian Science Congress last week, said that STI 2013 aimed to position India among the &ldquo;top five scientific powers&rdquo; by 2020. Technology missions will target global leadership in select areas.

First, a scientific temper

Many investors, mostly overseas, have often expressed concerns about India Inc&rsquo;s opaque corporate governance practices. In that context, the Securities and Exchange Board of India&rsquo;s (Sebi&rsquo;s) decision to put the issue of governance under the spotlight is welcome. The proposals aim to make Clause 49 of the listing agreement, which spells out corporate governance rules, relevant. This follows the passage of the Companies Bill by the Lok Sabha last month. The suggestions are intended to make companies more accountable to minority shareholders, who have been affected by certain actions by promoter-controlled firms.

Principles and rules

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

Case study

When selling shares in an open offer, two things have to be kept in mind. One, the price being offered and two, the tax implication. In most cases, as soon as the open offer price is announced, there is a sharp surge in the share price as traders reduce the gap between the existing and offer price, in the hope that the company will be forced to hike the open offer price further. They are taxed like debt funds &mdash; 10 per cent with indexation and 20 per cent with indexation benefits.

Tipping point

Business Standard brings to you a snapshot of average current rates and unit sizes in localities that offer property in the price range of Rs 50 lakh to Rs 1 crore.

Business Standard

Business Standard

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