I changed my job last week and my new employer has asked me to open a new account.

Banking: Sumant Kathpalia

Business Standard

Pravin Bangera and his spouse, Sushella, live in Virar, near Mumbai. Pravin works as an advertising manager with a leading media company, while Sushella is assistant manager (administration) in a logistics firm. They have a five-year-old son. Both have struggled in their careers, which prompted Pravin to enroll and complete a part-time MBA a few years before. This enabled him to get the present job.

Personal finance case study: 26 Nov 2012 

The industry ignored measures that would have improved iron ore quality, but then, the mining ban has done considerable harm too
Sushim Banerjee 
Director General, INSDAG*
&ldquo;Iron ore shortage will hit the industry hard, but the steel industry did not pay attention to beneficiation or pelletisation, which could enable it to use fines or convert low-grade ore to high-grade ones&rdquo;
India is shortly going to add around 26 million tonnes of steel through brownfield expansion, and this

Is the government killing the steel industry?

What to make of the compromise allegedly worked out between Egypt&rsquo;s President Mohammed Morsi and the judiciary to curb the sweeping powers he gave himself last Thursday? Those powers, among other things, put his rulings outside the purview of judicial review until a new Parliament is elected. The agreement, as purveyed to the press by a presidential spokesperson, suggests that only &ldquo;sovereign decisions&rdquo; would be kept outside judicial oversight.

The Pharaoh complex

The central government is going full speed ahead with the operationalisation of the Aadhaar platform. About 50 districts will have various pilot projects running soon; and it intends the entire country, more or less, to have access to the Unique ID-empowered variants of existing schemes by the end of 2013, according to a recent statement by the finance minister. The movement to cash transfers for welfare spending is overdue and presents the possibility of considerable saving.

UID's unintended effect

Normally, diseases that break out during the rainy season tend to fade away on the withdrawal of the monsoon. That hasn&rsquo;t happened this year. Infections typical of hot and humid weather, such as dengue, malaria, encephalitis, meningitis and chikungunya, have tended to persist despite the onset of winter. Meanwhile, cold-weather maladies like various types of influenza, including the dreaded swine flu and bird flu, have also surfaced. Delhi alone has recorded more than 1,800 cases of dengue &ndash; the count of unreported cases must be much higher &ndash; causing scores of deaths. Mumbai, too, has seen over 700 cases of dengue, including some deaths, the most famed victim being filmmaker Yash Chopra. The situation in other cities and villages is no different. And over a dozen cases of swine flu, caused by the H1N1 virus, have come to light in areas around Delhi.

Unseasonal illness 

Anyone who doesn&rsquo;t know what Reserve Bank of India Deputy Governor Subir Gokarn looks like may mistake him for a spiritual guru. At least that is what the wife of Bank of Maharashtra Executive Director C V R Rajendran initially thought. Gokarn&rsquo;s special address at a banking conference hosted by the bank last week was followed by a special discourse from spiritual leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. In his inauguration speech, Rajendran said, &ldquo;When we were going through the profiles and photographs of the invitees, my wife asked why there were two Swamijis at the conference.&rdquo; When Rajendran told her Gokarn is an economist, his wife asked whether there is a relationship between the two. There is, he replied. &ldquo;One is the cause of my problem and the other is the solution; one decides how many sleeping tablets I take in a day and the other tells me how to relieve this stress.

The Swami and the economist

Gokarn got some mild revenge soon after over the issue of curbing gold demand. He suggested several financial instruments as an alternative to physical investment in gold, but Rajendran countered with a novel idea &mdash; increase locker rents 10 times to discourage people from buying gold. The idea would work because women don&rsquo;t feel safe wearing gold in public these days and store all of it in banks. &ldquo;Locker charges are not regulated, so no one stops you from doing that,&rdquo; came Gokarn&rsquo;s quick response.

Lock and stock

A finance ministry official hopes that the rupee will appreciate in two to three months once the economy is back on an upward curve. Common sense could be misleading where technical knowledge of the subject is required. If the economy grows fast, ceteris paribus, it will lead to additional imports bringing further strains on the rupee. Exports depend on the rest of the world &mdash; the economic prospects of which are not bright. Has the finance ministry done any quantitative analysis of the income elasticities of demand for exports and imports vis-&agrave;-vis the rest of the world to justify the official&rsquo;s optimism? The Reserve Bank should examine whether the depreciation of the rupee has anything to do with the large-scale forex transactions in the recent period. The heavy repo transactions need to be examined to find out their destinations. Treasury earnings can be sizeable on large transactions, even if the margins are small.

Letters: An 'optimistic' mistake

Spiritual leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar is nothing if not wholly temporal when it comes to dispensing advice. Asked by one banker how to deal with a stressful relationship with his boss, Shankar&rsquo;s suggestion was that instead of contradicting his boss, the man should handle the problem with &ldquo;skill&rdquo; and make him say what he himself believed in. &ldquo;And if you think he opposes whatever you say, then say the opposite,&rdquo; he added.

Opposite attraction

For the last few months, State Bank of India in its advertisements has been asking customers to get new cheque books because the old ones will not be valid from January 1, 2013. The ads also mention that the bank will send the new cheque books to customers&rsquo; registered addresses. Recently, a news channel said this rule would apply to all other banks. When I tried to clarify that, I got different replies from four different banks. One said its cheques already conformed to the new guidelines; another said customers get a get limited supply of new cheque books; the third one said there was no reason to worry if the old cheques conformed to core banking solutions; and, the fourth bank said the old cheques could still be used for cash withdrawals after January 1. But they all maintained that the new cheque books would not be sent to the customers directly. They needed to duly fill the required slips.

Letters: New cheque books

This refers to Mihir Sharma&rsquo;s column &ldquo;Judge hanging&rdquo; (Ticker, November 24). By describing Kasab as just another &ldquo;young, deprived and brainwashed&rdquo; Pakistani, the author ignores the jihadi fervour of the Islamic terrorists, seeking salvation by killing non-Muslims. This is like describing 9/11 as a &ldquo;construction disaster&rdquo;, or Fort Hood shooting as &ldquo;workplace violence&rdquo;. If the absence of the death penalty in a country is a measure of maturity, or &ldquo;largeness&rdquo; of any democracy, the US would not pass the test &mdash; for not only it exterminates terrorists, it does so without any due process on foreign soil, without permission of the host government. Moreover, Turkey would qualify for a place at the high table in the comity of successful democracies. It is unfortunate that the writer is among those who believe fighting terror is just a competition in public school manners.

Letters: Fighting terror

This refers to the edit &ldquo;Swift closure&rdquo; (November 22). The nation and the government appear to be in a self-congratulatory mood over the hanging of the lone surviving Pakistani gunman from the 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai. Fortunately, nobody thought of making Kasab aware of the strange provision in our legal system that makes even a presidential rejection of a mercy plea subject to judicial review. Otherwise, the case would have dragged on for some more time.

Letters: The Kasab conundrum

Coca-Cola&rsquo;s Support My School initiative in India has been touted as one of the biggest CSR initiatives by corporate India and is beamed on NDTV with a lot of fanfare. Coca-Cola is not the only company that has effectively bundled, branded and communicated its CSR efforts; too many companies have started communicating their CSR efforts too early in too conspicuous a way.

CSR: A marketing tool?

Business Standard brings to you a snapshot of average current prices and unit sizes in localities that offer property in the price range of Rs 1.5 crore to Rs 2 crore.

Realty check

Health expenditure in India was largely funded out of the pocket.

Trends in healthcare expenditure

The government is low on cash to finance its fiscal deficit, and is also facing an investment slowdown. It is looking to public-sector units (PSUs) to help with both problems. After all, as Table 1 shows, several of them &ndash; especially those in resource extraction &ndash; were making high and increasing profits even during the recent industrial slump.

StatsGuru: 26-November-2012

Bal Thackeray&rsquo;s death appears to have disproved the common notion that the Shiv Sena no longer wields much influence over workers&rsquo; unions in Mumbai. The walls outside the offices of the Reserve Bank of India and the Mint had prominent boards put up by the unions of both institutions carrying obituaries of the Sena leader.

Thackeray's shadow

They might have criticised Bal Thackeray roundly for his communal and regional politics when he was alive but the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and Congress have displayed as much solidarity as Sena workers themselves over his death. In Mumbai, boards were put up by NCP leaders remembering Thackeray, and the party also published a newspaper advertisement in his memory. Not to be outdone, one Congress councilor demanded Dadar station be renamed after Thackeray at a special general body meeting called by the BMC as a memorial service. Incidentally, Thackeray had opposed renaming Dadar station when there was a demand to name it after Babasaheb Ambedkar. Shiv Sena&rsquo;s stand on the issue now will be worth watching.

Memorial services

Ajmal Kasab&rsquo;s hanging was certainly expected to produce its share of B-grade films but one producer has moved with lightning speed, releasing a movie titled 26/11 Mission Complete. The tagline reads: &ldquo;Kasab hanged. Justice done.&rdquo; accompanied by a photo circled by a hangman&rsquo;s rope.

Hanging on the story

This refers to T N Ninan&rsquo;s column &ldquo;What about depositors?&rdquo; (Weekend Ruminations, November 24). The writer&rsquo;s concern for bank depositors is quite refreshing. Every time, the monetary policy is about to be announced, there are only talks about reducing the lending rate; nobody has taken up the cause of depositors the way Ninan has. No doubt, the solution for a bank&rsquo;s profitability is maintaining a competitive net interest margin (NIM).

Business Standard

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