Liquor baron Ponty Chadha who was killed during a shootout with his brother, Hardeep, is not the first Indian businessman who met with a violent end.

A few more businessmen who were killed...

Business Standard

Despite at least 400 prisoners serving under the death sentence in India, the country&rsquo;s record of executions is lower than many (Click on graphic)

Global gallows

The attack on Mumbai that unfolded on November 26, 2008, and didn&rsquo;t stop for 60 unrelenting hours was not an ordinary crime. Indeed, if there ever is any occasion that fits the Supreme Court&rsquo;s &ldquo;rarest of rare&rdquo; qualifier in handing out the death sentence, this would be it, considering how emotive the issue has become in India and how much the scenes of carnage from 26/11 have embedded themselves in collective public memory.

Swift closure

Over five decades IITs are famous for the merit based admissions and very negligible tuition fees. Also most of the students belong to villages. Those students were passionately working hard to get to IITs as the fee burden on the family was less. Now the hiking of the fees may be marginal from institute&rsquo;s point of view but this means a lot to those student. Loan requires heavy documentation and ultimately adds pressure to students. Instead IITs should look for options such as corporate sponsorship's, funds from government, and alumni, among others.

Student's corner

The buzz was that Air India One, the Indian prime minister&rsquo;s official plane, was going to take off half an hour earlier than scheduled from the Phnom Penh VVIP air strip on Tuesday evening. Then, there was talk that the delay was on account of a brief meeting with US President Barack Obama, so the air was thick with expectation of what Singh might have to say. But within minutes of take-off &ndash; on time &ndash; it was clear that Singh would not hold his customary on-board press conference after all. Commerce and Industry Minister Anand Sharma and senior bureaucrats would fill in for him. The reason, though, had nothing to do with any high-level confabulations by the prime minister, but something as mundane as a sore throat. But that didn&rsquo;t stop journalists from speculating that Singh had been advised not to face media questions just ahead of the winter session of Parliament, that is almost guaranteed to be stormy.

Talked down

The on-board briefing on Air India One turned a little confusing over who was to be quoted and who was not. Initial instructions were that top government officials would provide reporters with a strictly off-the-record briefing without naming names. This did not, however, please Commerce and Industry Minister Anand Sharma, who was standing in for the prime minister. He was seen whispering to foreign ministry officials after which Sharma&rsquo;s comments were declared on the record. The other senior official at the briefing remained off the record. After the conference, byte-hungry reporters even managed to get some exclusive footage with Sharma.

Unquote, quote

It&rsquo;s not just the primary markets that are in a soporific state, investment bankers appear to be no less sleepy. Recently, at a press conference organised by the first company to hit the markets with an IPO (initial public offering) in five months, the chief of a leading investment bank was caught off guard. He was asked whether recent changes in IPO regulations would apply. What changes? His colleague had to first brief his boss on the new rules that were announced in August and amended last month. Later, both of them had to make frantic calls and check whether the new regulations had, indeed, come into play.

Out of order

Apropos the debate &ldquo;What&rsquo;s better: a single-member or a three-member CAG?&rdquo; (November 21), the reason behind the UPA (United Progressive Alliance) government&rsquo;s intention to make the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) a multi-member body is the latter&rsquo;s role in exposing the misdeeds of the ruling government. Whenever an institution exerts its constitutional powers to make the ruling establishment accountable to the people, the latter attempts to mess up the institution by altering its basic structure and appointing establishment loyalists. That cannot be allowed. Moreover, Subhash Kashyap has rightly pointed out that it doesn&rsquo;t matter whether CAG is single-member or multi-member; what matters is the personality of the person/people holding the constitutional positions.

Letters: Watchdog of democracy

Apropos Anol Nath Chatterji&rsquo;s article &ldquo;CAG follows global best practices&rdquo; (November 12), it is clear that the independence of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) is an important cornerstone of India&rsquo;s democracy guaranteed by the Constitution. The founding fathers of the Republic of India foresaw that any legislative interference &ndash; even in seemingly unimportant matters like salaries and expenses of CAG and his staff &ndash; would undermine its functioning.

Letters: CAG's global presence

This refers to A K Bhattacharya&rsquo;s column &ldquo;Is Singh a victim of politics&rdquo; (Raisina Hill, November 19). Prime Minister Manmohan Singh&rsquo;s role as a politician is an outcome of his helplessness. The Congress party (read Sonia Gandhi) had changed the UPA governance structure soon after making Singh the prime minister. It transferred all powers of the PM to the Congress president. The transformation of Singh as a politician accommodating party compulsions is a bonus to the party, since it need not think twice before taking any decision that have implications on the government&rsquo;s role. When you cannot fight them, join hands with them &mdash; this aptly sums up the PM&rsquo;s role.

Letters: Singh, the politician

The recent summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean, in Phnom Penh was noteworthy for two reasons. First, because it became clear that a powerful bloc within Asean is not willing to allow Beijing to bully its way through maritime territorial disputes, even though the host nation, Cambodia, lobbied hard for China.

More FTAs, less red tape

This refers to the debate &ldquo;What&rsquo;s better: a single-member or a three-member CAG?&rdquo; (November 21). Nothing should be done out of anger, and far less a constitutional amendment. The people of India attach sanctity to the Constitution, and, so should the government. The timing of the government&rsquo;s intention to form a triumvirate of Comptroller and Auditor Generals (CAGs) shows that it is not backed by any logic, but a need to settle a score with an incumbent.

Letters: Keep CAG out of politics

Apropos the editorial &ldquo;Bequest tax worries&rdquo;(November 15), the abolition of estate duty was necessitated by poor collection of revenues, and relatively high collection expense. But if the basic objective behind such an inheritance tax is reducing wealth inequality, it cannot be faulted. Making the rich pay more is easy, but as we have seen, it results in more tax-evasion. In this context, the suggestion made in the editorial to introduce exempt-exempt-tax scheme may be appropriate.

Letters: Taxing inheritance

This refers to the report &ldquo;New bank licences 8-9 months after enabling legislation&rdquo; (November 17). If the finance ministry is confident that an amendment in the Banking Regulation Act is not necessary to give the powers sought by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for approving new banks, why is it not trying to convince the apex bank first? The finance minister&rsquo;s statement that the ministry has &ldquo;written&rdquo; to RBI to start receiving applications is absurd.

Letters: Make RBI whim-free

Alphonsus Stoelinga, Netherlands&rsquo; Ambassador to India, had a revelation. When he arrived in India, he learnt that Alphonso is a popular variety of mango available here. So, he jocularly says: &ldquo;I am a mango man. I am just an aam aadmi.&rdquo; He finds that a perfect way to break the ice with people he meets.

'Aam aadmi' ambassador

When Finance Minister P Chidambaram visited the central processing centre (CPC) during a trip to Bangalore this week, officials of the income tax (I-T) department did not waste the opportunity. They asked Chidambaram to write in their visitors&rsquo; book and he duly obliged by showering praise on CPC, saying it represented a technological leap for the I-T department and he was greatly impressed by it. Revenue Secretary Sumit Bose and Central Board of Direct Taxes Chairperson Poonam Saxena added similar comments. But CPC Bangalore did not think it necessary to restrict this fulsome praise from the finance ministry brass to the visitors' book, so it uploaded the comments on the I-T website for the world to see.

Spreading the good word

Former Karnataka Chief Minister B S Yeddyurappa, who is expected to quit the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on December 9, has found a new office for his recently formed Karnataka Janata Party (KJP), and it is one with a chequered political history. The new headquarters is a small house in Rannebennur Colony that has been the political office of almost all the major parties that have contested in the state Assembly elections. Till Yeddyurappa&rsquo;s supporters converted it into the KJP office, it was the BJP&rsquo;s Karnataka office. But the house was first occupied by the Congress, then the Janata Dal, and even former Chief Minister Ramakrishna Hegde of the Lok Shakti was once an occupant of the house. For a very brief period, the house was occupied by the Janata Dal (United), too.

House parties

The government has finally kicked the disinvestment ball a little further towards the goal of achieving the target figure of Rs 30,000 crore this financial year. With luck it might get there, though the lacklustre state of the stock market is no help &mdash; as demonstrated by the response to the ONGC share auction, which was salvaged only by the Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) picking up the bulk of what was on offer.

India's own fiscal cliff

Not for a decade has growth in gross domestic product been as low as it is likely to be this financial year. Finance Minister P Chidambaram now says that it may be in the 5.5-6.0 per cent range; the Reserve Bank&rsquo;s figure is midway, at 5.7 per cent. More worryingly, while the slowdown has been caused very substantially by a shortfall in investment, there seem to be few sources of recovery on this front.

The sources of growth

At a time when online posts on a social networking platform by two students has created a furore in the online and offline worlds, security firm McAfee has come up with a survey which shares insights on how Indian teenagers behave online. The survey shows one in every four teens has been a victim of cruel behaviour online, 35 per cent willingly access pornography and almost all have been active in social networks since the age of 13. Here's a picture of the dark alleys of the online world.

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