The month-long lockout at Maruti Suzuki&rsquo;s Manesar plant, which produces the company&rsquo;s best-sellers Swift and DZire, led to a production loss of 36,000 units, thereby bringing the overall car sales in the domestic market down by 8%. Excluding Maruti&rsquo;s numbers, the sales data of half a dozen other car companies show a over 14% growth in volumes.

Car market hits the Maruti bump...

Business Standard

Markets heaved a sigh of relief when Q2 (calendar year) GDP growth surprised on the upside &mdash; printing at 5.5 per cent versus the 5.3 per cent of the previous quarter and the sub-5 per cent number that had been feared in some quarters. Some may be tempted to presume from on Friday&rsquo;s print that, perhaps, growth has already bottomed in India and the worst is behind us.

Comment: Sajjid Chinoy

In his column White Knight, Bhupesh Bhandari attributes the perceived improvement in product quality and after-sale service to the entry of multinational companies (&ldquo;Swadeshi, circa 2012,&rdquo; August 31). But the real villain was the Licence Raj. India would have seen a similar amelioration in product quality and service had we done away with licensing and encouraged domestic competition. The gradual lowering of the protectionist customs duty would have provided an added impetus.

Letters: Licence Raj: The real villain

Friday&rsquo;s Supreme Court order against the massive money-raising activity by the Sahara group &ndash; two Sahara group companies have been ordered to repay their investors Rs 17,000 crore plus interest calculated at 15 per cent &ndash; raises questions for both lawmakers and regulators. Most importantly, is India&rsquo;s regulatory framework equipped to consistently detect, halt and penalise such organised efforts? The court&rsquo;s order lays out how two Sahara group companies made &ldquo;a pre-planned attempt&rdquo; to &ldquo;bypass the regulatory and administrative authority&rdquo; of the Securities and Exchange Board of India, or Sebi. In this case, a few Sebi officials relentlessly pursued the case; will similar doggedness be always on display? The regulator should take steps to institutionalise the elements that led to this rare victory in court.

Learning from Sahara

This refers to Sukumar Mukhopadhyay&rsquo;s article &ldquo;CAG versus PM: The fine print&rdquo; (August 30). It is particularly significant that the writer has proved that the prime minister&rsquo;s arguments are not tenable even on technical grounds. The piece is an excellent analysis of the Comptroller and Auditor General&rsquo;s powers and functions that have unduly come under fire from the government.

Letters: The CAG wins

On Friday, the Union ministry of statistics released estimates of gross domestic product for the first quarter of this financial year. Between April and June of 2012, GDP grew 5.5 per cent compared to the equivalent quarter in the previous year, which was better than expected; in the previous quarter, January-March 2012, GDP had grown 5.3 per cent year-on-year, and so the performance was marginally better. This was the first uptick in quarterly growth for a year. However, it is more than clear that there are few grounds for optimism; even those within the government, such as Montek Singh Ahluwalia, have been hesitant to call this a &ldquo;rebound&rdquo;. It is far from clear that growth is poised to recover. Indeed, the signs suggest otherwise. Most visibly, overall growth was not matched by growth in gross fixed capital formation, which grew merely 0.7 per cent between April and June. In the same quarter of last year, gross fixed capital formation had grown 14.9 per cent.

Centre's only choice 

Work discipline and punctuality in office times don&rsquo;t just apply to finance ministry officials, now other staffers and cleaners alike have to follow a set schedule too. Last month an office memo instructed all officials to be present in the office from 9 a m to 5 p m. The memo also fixed the office cleaning schedule. Earlier the cleaners would arrive halfway through the workday to clean the rooms, disrupting the bureaucrats&rsquo; work. Now the memo has stipulated that they have to do their work early in the morning.

Clean sweep

Finance ministry officials are getting some practical lessons on the importance of punctuality these days, courtesy Finance Minister P Chidambaram just one month into the job. He is well known for reaching meetings and conferences on time and is fairly scathing with those who don&rsquo;t do the same. Another lesson they are learning is the art of the precis. Whenever the finance minister calls an official for briefing on a particular issue, the official is allotted a time, say five minutes, to make his point. &ldquo;We have to explain everything in those five minutes. You can&rsquo;t beat around the bush. So, it needs a lot of preparation before one faces him,&rdquo; said one official.

Timed out 

The Madhya Pradesh government recently awarded one Dr Leeladhar Viyogi the Maharishi Ved Vyas National Award. The award was conferred at a glittering function attended by a state minister of cabinet rank and organised at the state government&rsquo;s expense at the India International Centre in New Delhi. What did Dr Viyogi do to merit the award? The state government&rsquo;s press release is silent on this crucial fact. A hint can, however, be found in the fact that the release extensively quoted Sushma Swaraj, BJP politician and leader of the opposition in Parliament, admitting that honouring her Guru was an &ldquo;opportunity&rdquo; for her to repay Guru Dakshina (gratitude), which she owes him since her college days. His brilliant guidance, Swaraj&rsquo;s quote read, helped win her laurels in her extra-curricular activities in college.

A guru's reward

The mining sector has been much in the news, thanks to the CAG report and its sharp slowdown in growth. As Table 1 shows, the supply of coal has only marginally increased each year of the past five, causing a chronic shortfall. Meanwhile, the production of iron ore &mdash; as visible in the same table &ndash; first plateaued and then took a sharp and worrying dip, alongside Supreme Court sanctions on iron-ore mining. As Table 2 shows, this has had an impact on the prices of both commodities.

StatsGuru: 3-September-2012

Shyamal Majumdar&rsquo;s column &ldquo;Time for self-regulation?&rdquo; (Human Factor, August 31) was well written. There are also a number of such CMDs and executive directors in banks who believe they deserve to be in top positions and look down on their colleagues. It isn&rsquo;t unusual to hear them pass sarcastic and unacceptable remarks at functionaries at meetings. The behaviour of these top executives is only encouraged by yes-men who aim to get coveted transfers, including postings abroad. Unfortunately, the system has tolerated and supported such officials.

Letters: Power abuse

This refers to T N Ninan&rsquo;s column &ldquo;Dr Faustus&rsquo;s price&rdquo; (Weekend Ruminations, September 1). The indiscriminate pillage of our country&rsquo;s wealth by politicians is indefensible. The state of governance is such that we have to depend on the Supreme Court and the Comptroller and Auditor General to clean the Augean stables. Instead of being contrite, senior leaders in the government have gone to brazen lengths to prove their no-loss theory. Do they think they can fool the masses? It&rsquo;s little wonder that the average citizen believes that all politicians are corrupt. Some even wonder whether the British were better than our current rulers. For most citizens, the dream of a just, developed and prosperous independent India has turned sour.

Letters: A dream gone awry

    The key gold for October delivery on the Multi Commodity Exchange (MCX) was 0.09 per cent lower at Rs 30,810 per 10 grammes, after losing 0.74 per cent in the previous three sessions.

Gold importers wait for price declines

Criminal law has some golden principles without which it leads to kangaroo courts. It seems that animal imagery irritates the principal Opposition of the country, so one would compound the discomfort by suggesting that their bark is worse than their bite. Either way, it is democracy that is being re-defined whilst we need to refine it for our times. Parliamentary debate is replaced by channels and political guests; the presiding officer by the anchor! Social media has aged TV even before it reached its prime.

For whom the bell tolls: Salman Khurshid

While West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee does not take cartooning or caricature kindly and the majority of the political class, too, shares a dislike for it, the new resident of Rashtrapati Bhavan has a different take. Pranab Mukherjee has always had a hearty laugh over a good caricature; he even hosted a group of cartoonists who had called on him on Saturday, inviting him for a function honouring the late cartoonist P K S Kutty, who used to caricature Mukherjee in Bengali newspapers Ananda Bazar Patrika and Aajkaal. Cartoonists who had lampooned Mukherjee in his heyday depicting him smoking a pipe, today even gifted the President his caricatures drawn by them.

Pranab: A cartoon lover

The recent tiff between Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) Vinod Rai and the United Progressive Alliance government is not being supported by the Bharatiya Janata Party, which strongly believes the Union government and its ministers should not comment against a constitutional authority. However, when senior leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) were asked if Rai would face trouble after May 2013, when he is set to retire from the top post, a senior leader quipped, &ldquo;We hope he never retires.&rdquo; BJP has supported Rai for coming out with a report on the allocation of coal blocks, which estimated a loss of Rs 1.86 lakh crore to the exchequer.

No retirement for CAG

Early last month, as it was trying to contain the fallout from the Assam riots, the government notified a draft framework for social media engagement as part of the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP). This was long overdue and the key word is &ldquo;engagement&rdquo;. The only real way to effectively counter the misuse of social media and SMS/MMS is to respond via the same channels and to do so more credibly and effectively. The draft seems to recognise the need for this shift in perception.

Taming Twitter 

State Bank of India (SBI) Chairman Pratip Chaudhuri has publicly joined issue with the banking regulator, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). Mr Chaudhuri questioned the central bank&rsquo;s practice of levying a cash reserve ratio, or CRR, by which a portion of bank deposits is impounded by the central bank, thus making credit both dearer and more scarce. This is akin to a schoolboy arguing with the headmaster. While bank chiefs routinely fall in line with what comes out of the RBI, the fact that the SBI chief is akin to the school head boy explains why perhaps only he could dare to go public. Banks, particularly the public sector ones, are looking for every bit of regulatory leeway they can get to make their performance look better. Mr Chaudhuri has said his aim is to raise a debate on an issue over which other bank chiefs hold similar views.

Debating cash reserve ratio

I am servicing a car and a home loan. I have a part-time job. I lost one job. Now, I am finding it difficult to service both the loans as by the month-end I am left with nothing. My children will go for higher studies in six-seven years, hence I have to save.

Debt Counselling: Sanjay Agarwal

Leader of the opposition Sushma Swaraj&rsquo;s accusation that the Congress-led UPA guzzled mota maal (fat bribes) by allocating coal blocks to private companies has made it the most quoted phrase in political circles this week. Swaraj&rsquo;s comment understandably raised the UPA&rsquo;s hackles, forcing Finance Minister P Chidambaram to respond within hours saying, &ldquo;I think such phrases should be avoided in civilian discourse.&rdquo; The next day RJD chief Laloo Prasad took up the fight on behalf of the UPA. &ldquo;With regard to the mota maal remark by BJP leader Sushma Swaraj, we want to know who used to take mota maal from the Reddy brothers of Karnataka,&rdquo; he said, alluding to the proximity between the mining barons, the Reddy brothers of Karnataka, and the BJP. Swaraj then hit back on Twitter, &ldquo;I would like to inform him and the country that the mota maal from Reddy Bros has also gone to the Congress Party.

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