If people were investments, the past year&rsquo;s champion would be a whiskey-drinking Venezuelan who sells pharmaceuticals to teenagers. And the biggest loser would be a coffee-drinking social-media addict from Spain. Well, that&rsquo;s one interpretation of the year&rsquo;s best and worst investments. Read on to learn why homebuilders and wheat farmers prospered in 2012, while coal miners and self-described &lsquo;prudent bears&rsquo; did not.

The winners & losers of 2012

Business Standard

A host of education institutions in the country, including the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Shiv Nadar University and Manipal among others, are offering dual degree programmes.

Check list for dual degree programmes 

The year-end holiday spirit will certainly be missing this year at the Reserve Bank of Indiaâ€™s (RBIâ€™s) headquarters on Mint Road. For Finance Minister P Chidambaram has just taken away the RBIâ€™s last reason to delay the final guidelines for new banking licences.

The banking win-win

This refers to the report &ldquo;Kaushik Basu warns of inflation shadow on direct cash transfer&rdquo; (December 20). Chief Economist Kaushik Basu&rsquo;s statement that the direct cash transfer scheme might create a risk of inflationary pressure on the economy is not based on a rational analysis of macroeconomics. His logic is that since more money will go into the hands of the people, their purchasing power will increase. It&rsquo;s important to consider that the cash transfer scheme will substitute two elements &mdash; subsidy and waste. Now, subsidies are transferred through the public distribution system and other schemes. On the other hand, waste has come to be built on several schemes, such as food and fertiliser &mdash; the enormity of which is not quantifiable but easily imaginable as large.

Letters: Cash instead of subsidies

In one of the most anticipated and predicted election results of recent times, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi has been returned to office for the third successive time, with by all accounts a largely unchanged majority in the state Assembly.

Beyond the fog of spin

The Companies Bill, 2011, cleared by the Lok Sabha on Tuesday, has many forward-looking provisions: the option to set up one-person companies, which will help bring the unorganised sector under the corporate umbrella; penalty for auditors found involved in frauds; class action; protection for whistleblowers; easy exit for minority shareholders if the articles of association are changed; and strengthening of the Serious Fraud Investigation Office.

Still not a finished product

After suffering the ignominy of having papers containing the Bill for reservations in promotions snatched from him by a Samajwadi Party (SP) member of Parliament in the Lok Sabha on Wednesday, V Narayanaswamy, minister of state for personnel, came well prepared on Thursday. Not only was he seated far from the aisles (from where the SP member had accosted him), he made sure two other Congress members sat alongside him. Also, there were no papers in his possession this time, since he spoke after learning his lines by rote. The latter fact did not go unnoticed by Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kamal Nath and Congress President Sonia Gandhi, both of whom turned round and acknowledged Narayanaswamy&rsquo;s efforts.

Lessons in self-defence

Finance Minister P Chidambaram is generally loath to being in the limelight, especially when it comes to policies concerning economic reforms that are by no means universally popular with members of Parliament. So, he made it a point to gracefully extricate himself from any association with Manmohan Singh&rsquo;s economic policies in his reply to the discussion on the banking Bill in the Lok Sabha earlier this week. &ldquo;One of the honourable members blamed what he described as the Manmohan-Chidambaran model,&rdquo; he said in the face of frequent interruptions. &ldquo;Please do not equate me with the prime minister. The prime minister is a distinguished economist; I am not. The prime minister has vast experience; I do not have. But the Manmohan model also showed to this country that we can achieve above nine per cent growth. The Manmohan model also showed to this country that we can reduce our fiscal deficit to below three per cent and it came to 2.7 per cent...

Model denial

Ministerial responsibilities can be onerous but they appear to be uniquely so for Food Minister K V Thomas. Speaking at a sugar cooperative event on Wednesday, he said ruefully, &ldquo;The food ministry is like the husband of three wives. We have to see that farmers are happy, the industry is happy and consumers are happy.

Husbanding pressures

Transparency and information are not attributes readily associated with China, and nowhere was this more evident than during the visit of an official Chinese youth delegation recently. Asked if they would like to visit Parliament, members of the delegation readily agreed. Asked if the delegation would like to visit the office of the Central Information Commission in Delhi, however, the denial was equally vehement.

No information

This refers to Andy Mukherjee&rsquo;s article &ldquo;In 2013, bet on consumption&rdquo; (December 18). Chasing high inflation, we have somewhat demonised deficits forgetting for a moment that it depends on the composition and the quality of total government spending. Deficits incurred on current spending are generally bad, because they produce no revenue and add to the national debt. Insightful spending, however, produces revenue that extinguishes debt, raises productivity, and long-term growth. Reducing deficits on current spending is justified only if it be replaced by capital-spending programmes, since it would ensure that people can buy and industries can produce. Currently, touching a low of five to six per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP), we must stand warned. Subsidies balloon deficits in stealth, under the cover of inclusiveness.

Letters: Tackle the deficits

In India management is synonymous with IIMs, technology with IITs, MBBS with AIMS, Law with National Law College, Basic Sciences with St. Stephen's and so on. We have already seen even after so many years of incorporating MBAs and humanities into the IITs they have not come at par with other top institutes in their respective discipline.

Student's corner

For most of its second term in office, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government has been a study in inaction. Its Cabinet has sent out mixed signals on policy; it has been unable to push legislation through Parliament; its decision-making bodies, mainly groups of ministers, have repeatedly been unable to evolve consensus on difficult issues; and even its control over basic administrative matters has been weak and inefficient.

UPA's second wind

This refers to Ajai Shukla&rsquo;s column &ldquo;Making the Tejas fly&rdquo; (Broadsword, December 11) and his report &ldquo;Rs 1,500 crore more for combat aircraft Tejas as HAL fails to meet target&rdquo; (December 9). We are pained that he has chosen to criticise Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) based on half-truths and comments made by a retired personnel.

Letters: HAL replies

&ldquo;The real mischief lurks in processes leading up to the award of a concession and its interpretation over the life of the award.

Should CAG audit PPP projects?

John Bogart&rsquo;s famous definition of journalism (when a dog bites a man, that is not news; but if a man bites a dog, it is) found a new version in Chhattisgarh&rsquo;s Dhamtari district earlier this week. An elderly woman in Basanwahi village died of snakebite. The villagers spotted the snake and captured it. But, instead of killing it, they fastened it by a rope to the pole of a street light and informed the police and local journalists, demanding action against the &ldquo;culprit&rdquo;. Both were equally perplexed: the police over what action to take against the snake and the journalists over how to report the incident. Since people routinely die of snakebite in these parts, the incident clearly wasn&rsquo;t news, so journalists diligently searched for a new angle. And finally, they found the headline: &ldquo;Villagers take snake hostage&rdquo;. There was no report, however, of what the police did.

Rope trick

An Indian Forest Service officer in Chhattisgarh learnt the hard way that corruption doesn&rsquo;t always pay, even if it&rsquo;s possible to get away with it. Posted in Bastar, he bought some property near Raipur but in a relative&rsquo;s name. In vain, since the proxy purchase was discovered and the value of the the property was clearly disproportionate to his known means of income. Having discovered that a search by the economic offences wing was imminent, the official handed over the land records to his doctor friend. The doctor proceeded to take advantage of this and sold the property. When the forest official finally tried to reclaim the land, the revenue record showed that it had been sold. It was only when his relative, in whose name the property had been bought, lodged a complaint that the doctor was finally arrested, though the official went scot-free since he wasn&rsquo;t legally involved in the deal.

Lie of the land

It's the season to sing carols, eat plum cakes and make merry.

Winter wonderland

If the current government needed one index of how slowly economic reform has progressed in India it need look no further than its doorstep at the bottom of Raisina Hill where a protest, mostly by young men and women, against a brutal gang rape in New Delhi has descended into a pitched battle with the police. For many, the protests are overdone, the argument being that similar crimes occur elsewhere in the country and are rarely highlighted thus. But the intensity of middle-class anger in this instance is instructive; it focuses on repeated crimes against urban professional, working women, emerging from the social purdah that society has long imposed. In a sense, therefore, it represents a voice for their oppressed, silent sisters everywhere in India.

Demonstration effect

Steel production in 62 countries reporting to the World Steel Association increased to 122 million tonnes (mt) in November 2012, compared to the year-ago period-a rise of 5.1 per cent (Click on graphic)

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