The notification of new rules for the Right to Information (RTI) Act announced two weeks ago has raised the bar for information seekers. The new rules mean that many RTI applications could cost more. Also, in cases where the applicant appeals to the Central Information Commission (CIC) due to a reluctance on the part of the relevant public authority to provide information, the rules imply that the applicant must be present or available on video-conference. This provision is wrong-headed: it could inconvenience applicants, or even put them in physical danger.

Too high a bar

Business Standard

As India celebrated Independence Day, people from all walks of life came out to mark the day.

Celebrating the spirit of freedom 

Over the past nine Independence Days, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has spoken often of the list of welfarist measures that his United Progressive Alliance (UPA) has promised to deliver. Some of them have become a reality, and are now being expanded. This year, for instance, he spoke of the National Rural Health Mission, while there are also several other measures that have taken very long to get off the ground &mdash; such as the attempt to improve the skills of India&rsquo;s young people. But the economic growth that underpins such giveaways has always been presented as an achievement, rather than as a promise. That this is a mistaken approach has been made clear by the fact that, with high growth vanishing, the UPA is finding it difficult to break out of the template of welfarism that it set for itself.

Create the consensus

Sahara India Pariwar, as the name suggests, makes no bones about its assumed consanguinity, calling itself the &ldquo;world&rsquo;s largest family&rdquo;. But in these days of labour discord, the group&rsquo;s Chairman Subrata Roy took it a step further, emphasising how there were &ldquo;no unions&rdquo; in the organisation that says it will generate 143,000 new jobs through its new retail venture. Moreover, apart from the tag of chairman, Roy is also known as the group&rsquo;s managing worker, &ldquo;Saharasri&rdquo; and &ldquo;Chief Guardian&rdquo;.

Family man

At any major press conference in the capital city, the norm would be for Delhi-based journalists to dominate proceedings. Not so at the Sahara India Parivar&rsquo;s New Delhi press event recently, where it was journalists from Rajasthan who raised the first four questions to the group&rsquo;s Chairman Subrata Roy and it was non-Delhi journalists who grabbed the microphone the most for the remainder of the event.

Looking beyond Delhi?

I am a homemaker and interested in investing in the stock market. I am 43, with some knowledge of stock markets. Which route should I choose to enter the markets? Should I invest in direct stocks or mutual funds or both? After all expenses, I have Rs 5,000-6,000 by month-end. I already have five fixed deposits worth over Rs 5 lakh.

Investing: Rishi Nathany

Officials who attended the introductory meetings with Finance Minister P Chidambaram after he took over were immediately left in no doubt that it would be hard to escape his attention. At the very first meeting an official who attended said Chidambaram made it a point to remember everybody&rsquo;s name with the correct pronunciation.

Name, please

The Kerala government has announced the introduction of the new pension scheme &ndash; rechristened the &quot;participatory pension scheme&quot; &ndash; for its employees joining service from April 1, 2013 (&quot;Contributory pension scheme for new Kerala govt employees,&quot; August 9). The state's chief minister is lamenting that this will put additional burden on the state exchequer to the extent of 13 per cent of the wage bill in respect of new recruits and savings. For the new recruits, it will be a straight 13 per cent cut on their remuneration package, which, any serving employee will attest, is a little more than what a normal wage revision factors in as rise in total wages. The new pension scheme was kept outside the purview of the Sixth Pay Commission, although the scheme was under implementation and several central government employees &ndash; whose wage structure the Commission was reviewing &ndash; were affected by it. Some links are missing.

Letters: No pension scheme

Your edit title &quot;The six crises&quot; (August 14) reminds one of Richard Nixon's Six Crises (1962) that recounts his role in six major political crises.

Letters: The first crisis

Apropos your edit &ldquo;Not for the poor and sweaty&rdquo; (August 13), it is heartening to note that India has won six medals at Olympics but what about our national sport hockey that has again come in for criticism from all quarters. It is painful to see the national sport in such a critical situation. The government should earmark more money to promote hockey. Second, it should give a new life to the hockey team by inducting fresh talents.

Letters: What about hockey?

In 1927, Mahatma Gandhi described Katherine Mayo&rsquo;s provocative book Mother India as &ldquo;the report of a drain inspector sent out with the one purpose of opening and examining the drains of the country to be reported upon&rdquo;. This was an odd choice of disparagement, perhaps &mdash; as the Mahatma himself, who saw the improvement of India&rsquo;s villages as central to the independence project, wrote and spoke frequently about sanitation. The primary duty of the Gandhian village worker, he wrote, was to improve sanitation. Nor was it a problem of poverty: &ldquo;our poverty,&rdquo; he wrote, &ldquo;plays a very small part in our insanitary condition.

Unfinished agenda 

The state of professional higher education in India is abysmal. Consider engineering. All told, there are 1.5 million engineering seats in the country. Almost a third of these are unfilled, so about a million engineers are produced every year. Yet, barely 10 per cent of them are readily employable. About a quarter don&rsquo;t know enough English to make sense of the curriculum. The tab for this monumental inefficiency is picked up by the companies that draw from this pool. Every year, they end up spending thousands of crores of rupees to retrain the fresh graduates and make them job-worthy. The situation is no better in business schools. Unlike engineering colleges, the rot has not been measured here. But it can&rsquo;t be vastly different. People are, naturally, disillusioned: the number of students who appear in the entrance examinations for business schools has fallen steadily for three years. There are as many as 300,000 seats on offer; about one-third of this capacity is vacant.

Nine of ten, unemployable

Government data has been so error-prone of late that it is worth wondering about not just the veracity of its numbers but the manner in which they are calculated, as journalists attending Tuesday&rsquo;s press conference to announce the provisional export-import (exim) figures for July can attest. The presser degenerated into a messy affair when Director General of Foreign Trade (DGFT) Anup K Pujari read out incorrect trade deficit numbers. When a journalist pointed this out, Pujari&rsquo;s unrepentant answer was, &ldquo;Sorry, I calculated these only last night and I was sleepy.&rdquo; He must have been extremely sleep-deprived because it transpired that there were errors in the total export numbers too and, consequently, in the growth percentages. Still, it&rsquo;s hard to ascribe the problem of data errors to human error only. The practice of giving out the provisional exim numbers was started by former Commerce Secretary Rahul Khullar.

Numbers crunch

The Central Statistics Office (CSO) has decided to insulate itself from the vociferous criticism it has faced for frequent revisions in its data &mdash; not to forget the infamous goof-up of industrial production numbers in January. Since June, all its press releases begin by providing the sources of its data, which is 16 agencies from which it gathers the information. In January, CSO had had to face considerable flak when it revised growth in the index of industrial production from 6.8 per cent to 1.1 per cent after it discovered that the Directorate of Sugar had overestimated output by about three times.

Once bitten

In his column &ldquo;Still southward bound&rdquo; (Front Running, August 13), Devangshu Datta highlights the interesting fact that over the past 12 months, foreign institutional investors have invested Rs 55,000 crore in Indian equities whereas domestic institutions have withdrawn Rs 8,000 crore from equities and invested Rs 3.8 lakh crore in debt &mdash; in the hope of making windfall gains if the Reserve Bank of India reduces interest rates. He also mentions that India is likely to remain among the three fastest-growing economies.

Letters: Still strong

Sahara India Pariwar Chairman Subrata Roy may have labelled himself &ldquo;Saharasri&rdquo; but he also sees himself as a journalist. Of all the myriad businesses that make up the Sahara India Parivar, its media arm contains a clutch of news channels and publications. That is probably why Roy considers himself a part of the &ldquo;journalist family&rdquo;, a fact that he proudly announced at the recent event in New Delhi in front a crowd of journalists.

'Saharasri' and a journalist too?

&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think it is lost on the government that its actions now could impact its vote base and voter turnout in 2014. I anticipate higher spending on rural schemes and a greater thrust on financial inclusion.

Will the drought hit rural demand?

Employability&nbsp;has been one of the main issues haunting management institutes. With only 1 in 5 MBA's being employable, according to the MeritTrac MBA employability Study 2011-2012, management institutes should adopt a different line of thinking.

Student's corner

A general insurance company is liable to make claim payment within 30 days after receiving all the documents, statements and forms from the insured. An insurance company always tries to abide by the stipulated timeline. However, if there is an instance where the insurer is not in compliance with the same, the insured can directly call up the insurance company's call centre and report the grievance. Additionally, the insured can also reach out to the regulator&rsquo;s call centre or lodge the complaint on its website. Such claim payment related queries and delays are closely monitored by the regulator.

General insurance: Bhargav Dasgupta

Policy makers may have expressed a sigh of relief as inflation, measured by the wholesale price index, came down marginally to 6.87% in July from 7.25% in June. But headline numbers often don&rsquo;t tell the entire story. Even as India turned 65 and Prime Minster Manmohan Singh read out a long list of government programmes in his Independence Day speech, the Indian consumer has been bearing the brunt of raging inflation.

Business Standard

Business Standard

Page 858 - Business Standard