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

    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 

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

The mutual fund industry pins its hopes on Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) Chairman U K Sinha to revive its sagging fortunes because of his earlier stint as chief of UTI AMC. The Sebi chief, however, thinks this trust could be misplaced because, as he said, &ldquo;Everything you learn in one job may not be transported to the new job.&rdquo; He illustrated this with an example of an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer in Bihar. Brought up in Delhi and oriented to big city life, the officer was appointed sub-divisional magistrate (SDM) of a very small town in Bihar where he was assigned a bungalow surrounded by three acres of land. The SDM discovered that the government had sanctioned only one gardener; after some calculations he concluded that he needed at least four. He sent a request to the government. Despite pressing for it for four years, the request wasn&rsquo;t cleared.

Inconstant gardeners

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.

The mota maal's in the fire

It&rsquo;s been nearly 10 days since the exodus of people from the Northeast from Bangalore following rumours that spread like wildfire via the SMS and Internet. Many establishments that heavily depended on these people were badly hit. A popular restaurant had to suspend its operations. It had hoped to open soon and put up a notice on the door &ldquo;closed for two days&rdquo;. The notice remains there, and many &ldquo;two days&rdquo; have passed since then. It&rsquo;s been the case with a lot of other establishments since they cannot find a replacement, but wait for those who left to return.

Return of the non-natives

The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has stalled the monsoon session of Parliament over the Comptroller &amp; Auditor General&rsquo;s report criticising the government&rsquo;s allocations of captive coal mines to private companies. It remains unconvinced by the prime minister&rsquo;s 32-paragraph rebuttal to the CAG report in Parliament. But the prime minister could have silenced all opposition if his statement had included an important fact &mdash; that the predecessor BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) had gone some distance towards pushing the same policy. Indeed, the CAG report says as much. As far back as 2000, the NDA introduced an amendment Bill to the coal nationalisation Act in the Rajya Sabha seeking to allocate coal blocks to Indian companies for commercial purposes. The Bill was strongly opposed by trade union leaders and, in fact, is pending in the upper House.

Coal calls

This refers to &ldquo;Coal row: House battle set to turn into a war&rdquo; (August 29). In no other democracy would the head of the ruling party ask its members to wage war against the opposition, nor would the head of the government castigate the national auditor for fulfilling its constitutional obligation to make the government accountable. The opposition is as vital an organ in a democracy as the ruling establishment and boycotting Parliament is one of the legitimate tools for making the government accountable. During the National Democratic Alliance rule, the Congress-lead opposition also used the same tool more than often.

Letters: Respect the opposition

This refers to the report &ldquo;ONGC rapped for exploration delay&rdquo; (August 28). Performance audit was introduced as part of commercial audit that was carried out by the Indian Audit and Accounts Department in the late sixties. The purpose was to go beyond the mere checking of accounts and ensure that each item of expenditure was backed by a &ldquo;voucher&rdquo; and find out whether the expenditure from public funds actually served the purpose envisaged when the outlay of expenditure was planned.

Letters: A new authority, if not CAG 

Apropos the debate on phasing out the cash reserve ratio, bankers should be allowed to express their views freely on pertinent areas of the banking sector since that will go a long way in framing effective policy for financial stability. The regulator should welcome views as long as they do not damage anyone&rsquo;s interest.

Letters: Bankers can give views

The Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act of 1957, generally called the MMDR Act, is clearly not serving its purpose. It allows natural resources to be subject to cronyism and corruption, for example. Nor has the mining sector expanded sufficiently to keep up with growing demand. And there is also a growing perception that mineral resources are being exploited without many inhabitants of the areas around mines receiving any concomitant benefit or a sufficient say in the matter. Starting in July 2011, a new version of the law, also known as the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Bill, was cleared by the Cabinet, introduced in Parliament, and reviewed by its standing committee. The prime minister in his Independence Day speech, in fact, said that he expected its passage would be &ldquo;speedy&rdquo;.

Mining woes

The Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices has suggested that the government should do away with the &ldquo;levy quota&rdquo; on sugar mills, in which they need to set aside 10 per cent of their output for the public distribution system (PDS). Since it&rsquo;s meant for poor households, this sugar sells at a price that is significantly below the market price. This, in the Commission&rsquo;s opinion, has crimped the mills&rsquo; ability to adequately compensate sugarcane farmers.

Squeezing sugar mills

The Land Acquisition Bill &ndash; now renamed the Right to Fair Compensation, Resettlement, Rehabilitation and Transparency in Land Acquisition Bill, perhaps because the United Progressive Alliance really likes to call things &ldquo;rights&rdquo; &ndash; has been further delayed. After two successive attempts to pass it through the Cabinet failed this week, it has been referred to a group of ministers so that it can be gone through &ldquo;clause by clause&rdquo;.

Time to acquire

It may seem counter-intuitive, but lenders dislike a trend of rising interest rates almost as much as borrowers. First of all, rising rates reduce the mark-to-market value of any loans advanced previously at lower rates. They also choke off credit offtake volume. In a competitive lending environment, lenders are also compelled to hike their deposit rates, leading to pressure on spreads.

Provisioning for more

LAST WEEK WE ASKED:&nbsp; IIM Calcutta has started a unique programme called Insight, whereby, its faculty members will lecture on topics within their core area of expertise.

Students' corner

This refers to the front-page report &ldquo;SBI chief gets taste of RBI&rsquo;s tongue-lashing&rdquo; (August 28). It is unbecoming of Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Deputy Governor K C Chakrabarty to use such intemperate language to denounce State Bank of India Chairman Pratip Chaudhuri&rsquo;s suggestion that the cash reserve ratio (CRR) should either be done away with or banks should be compensated for the resultant loss of interest income.

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