Weak primary market conditions have taken a toll on India Inc&rsquo;s plans to raise funds through initial public offerings (IPOs). Since January 1, 2011, about 46 companies have called off their IPO plans aiming to raise a total Rs 38,326 crore, according to SMC Global. In 2012 so far, 17 IPOs to raise about Rs 5,928 crore, have been put on the backburner.

Choppy market hits IPO plans

Business Standard

I am 53 and a diabetic patient. I will be undergoing a planned cataract surgery by this year-end. I have heard that one can buy health cover for such planned surgeries. Could you elaborate? Also, would like to know the general insurers who cover diabetic individuals.

General Insurance: Gaurav Garg

The secretaries of three prominent ministries &mdash; agriculture, coal and food &mdash; would be retiring at the end of this month. P K Basu of the Department of Agriculture and Cooperation would see his term end in May, along with Alok Perti of the coal ministry. Food and public distribution department&rsquo;s Bhushan Chandra Gupta would also turn 60, the age for retirement, in May. As it is, the post of commerce secretary is yet to be filled after Rahul Khullar was appointed chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. With the buzz of policy paralysis afflicting the government, all eyes are now riveted on these upcoming vacancies; as to who will fill in these posts and give the economy the much-needed push.

A case of piling vacancies 

Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh says he finds the standing committee report on land Bill more or less acceptable but denies having any discussion with panel chairperson Sumitra Mahajan. &ldquo;I have met her just twice, once over tea and poha and later over batata wadas. All we spoke of was about Ahilya Bai Holkar, the large population of Malayalis in Indore and how most school teachers there are Malayalis,&rdquo; he says. Which is to say that they spoke on all things except land. He hails the report as acceptable and shrugs away the fact that Mahajan belongs to the Opposition, saying all are friends. It&rsquo;s another matter that he has rejected the key recommendations which would hurt the private sector, indicating the size of his ring of friendship.

Batata wadas and land Bill 

Most of the world&rsquo;s money consists of electronic ledger entries that happen to be backed by one central bank or another. At need, they may be turned into paper inscribed with promises to pay the bearer a certain sum. If someone brandishes one of those pieces of paper at a central bank governor and demands redemption, he would merely exchange it for a similar piece of paper. The magic of a currency is that so long as people use it to exchange goods and services requiring real resources to produce, it has value.

Virtual monetary reality 

It&rsquo;s raining targets at the recruitment firm I work. My boss has ordered me to interview 100 candidates on the phone and invite 30 to meet in person at the Bandra Kurla Complex office. Every last thing we do in office (except visiting the loo, though I have a feeling even that will begin to be recorded) must be filed, in real time, on dark-ages software that spits out feedback reports with maddening frequency.

Hour daily bread

The massive full-page advertisement in most newspapers all over India from by the AIADMK government of Tamil Nadu, on the occasion of its completion of one year in office, only indicates the scant regard with which taxpayers&rsquo; money is being spent by the government.

Letters: Ad power

Apropos the debate &ldquo;Should policy focus on growth or inflation&rdquo; (May 16), it is ably argued that growth with price stability is most desirable. However, it is equally important to maintain consistency and contain policy uncertainties to achieve robust economic growth and tackle inflationary expectations. Further, proper co-ordination between various policy authorities is needed to avoid a clash of interests.

Letters: Growth vs inflation

Apropos the edit &ldquo;Freedom to advertise&rdquo; (May 17), while you may be right in saying that viewers could switch off the television if they do not want to watch TV commercials, that might not be so easy, given the way the channels schedule TV commercials with the popular programmes. Are they not bombarding the viewer with unwanted advertisements in the guise of providing entertainment? The proliferation of ads during TV programmes, even during a live broadcast of a cricket match, disrupts the TV viewing experience.

Letters: Ask the viewers, please

This refers to the article &ldquo;Right to principals&rdquo; (May 17). Any&nbsp;effort to spread education has to begin with numbers and&nbsp;enrolment. &nbsp;Therefore, there is nothing wrong if government policy aims to achieve this objective. With mass education becoming a reality, quality is bound to suffer. This is not to justify the pathetic state of education succinctly brought out by the article. Yet, while it is important to empower school principals, the article misses out on certain relevant points. What about the quality of teachers? In this context, it is instructive to look at the teacher-student ratio. Further, the school curriculum should be reoriented to impart skills for effective participation. This aspect automatically leads us to explore a fundamental issue: what to teach? Some education experts have traced the ills of the current system to politicisation.

Letters: Lessons in education

The ratings for this edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL) may not be as high as expected, but that hasn&rsquo;t stopped it from getting into everyone&rsquo;s head, it appears. At a recent conference for human-resources professionals in Mumbai, the HR head of a capital goods firm used IPL to explain the difference between good talent and bad talent. Every company, he said, has that one inevitable, lazy employee who takes away lots of money while adding practically no value to the organisation. How did the IPL factor in? Well, he used the league&rsquo;s beleaguered Pune Warriors India team as an example. Such employees, he argued, merely added to the headcount in an organisation, just like Pune Warriors India, which was &ldquo;just one&rdquo; among the nine IPL teams, with no value-added. He further added that the performance of these employees, much like Pune Warriors India&rsquo;s in the IPL, must be constantly monitored.

Odd team out 

New York Life last month exited its decade-long life insurance partnership with Max India by selling its 26 per cent stake to Mitsui Sumitomo for Rs 2,731 crore. Investors in quite a few other life insurance companies are also looking to sell their stake. That&rsquo;s because the business case for the country&rsquo;s 23 private life insurers doesn&rsquo;t look very good. Twelve years after the sector was thrown open for private investment, only a handful of them are profitable. Income from new premiums has declined for at least six quarters. Rising gold and real estate prices reveal those are preferred destinations for investment. Unit-linked insurance plans, or Ulips, went out of favour once the regulator capped the expenses that could be deducted from the premium.

At a premium?

The temptation to have the well-cooked, highly seasoned fish curry of West Bengal, heavy with mustard and green chillies, can be difficult to decline. Anurag Thakur, the Bharatiya Janata Party Member of Parliament in the Lok Sabha, recently went to Kolkata, where he was served shorsher fish curry. Thakur, apparently, is normally a strict vegetarian and has been seen to stay carefully away from non-vegetarian food. For a change, however, he decided to try the fish curry. The young BJP leader wound up enjoying his meal so much that he has apparently decided to have fish curry every time he goes to Kolkata. Of course, this will come as no surprise to Bengalis &ndash; they&rsquo;re accustomed to hearing people say that they&rsquo;re vegetarian, except for fish, which is, after all, not meat.

Mr Mustard

Lutyens&rsquo; Delhi &ndash; the beauteous heart of the capital city, with tree-lined boulevards and colonial bungalows &ndash; was built by rulers (the British) to set themselves apart from the ruled. Eighty years after the bungalows were built by Edwin Lutyens, after whom the area is named in official papers as the Lutyens Bungalow Zone or LBZ, they are crumbling edifices caught in a time warp, or rebuilt by their occupants to modernise the interiors and (illegally) add rooms.

Red-light zone

What does KRA stand for &mdash; yes, the dreaded term that crops up during many companies&rsquo; annual assessment periods? According to a software services major, the definition has been changing over time. While it may be &ldquo;key result areas&rdquo; for the assessor, it may not be so for assessees, the firm&rsquo;s CEO was heard saying recently. His subordinates referred to KRA as &ldquo;kyun rakhe aapko&rdquo; (why should we keep you) given that there&rsquo;s a more-than-ample supply of required people during the slowdown. Of course, the moment the market picks up, and the industry recovers, and there&rsquo;s an acute shortage of talent, the definition changes &mdash; to &ldquo;kaun rehta hai aaj-kal&rdquo; (who will stay on nowadays).

What's KRA?

In a set of misguided restrictions, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, or Trai, has ordered all television channels to ensure that advertisements do not exceed 12 minutes in any given hour. These 12 minutes cannot be carried over onto later hours. Advertisements should be at least 15 minutes apart &mdash; except on movie channels, when they should be at least 30 minutes apart. There are a number of other, related proscriptions &mdash; banning drop-down advertisements, for example, and saying the average volume level of advertisements should not be greater than that of the programme they are sponsoring. Broadcasters, understandably, are up in arms: they have claimed this could impact their advertising revenues by as much as 40 per cent in some cases. Spot rates for television advertising have already fallen considerably, reflecting the weak economy and competition among channels.

Freedom to advertise

The analyses by this newspaper of corporate results for the fourth quarter of 2011-12 reveal that the trend of falling profit margins continues, allied to persistent inflation and a growth slowdown. This is the fifth successive quarter that margins have fallen and equity analysts have shaved forward estimates. Consensus earnings estimates of 2012-13 for the Nifty basket have been downgraded by two or three per cent since fourth-quarter results were received.

Margin trouble

The parliamentary standing committee on rural development has scrutinised the Centre&rsquo;s Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill, 2011 (the LARR Bill), and suggested several major changes. In particular, the committee thinks it desirable that the government be strictly limited in its acquisition of land &mdash; to projects with a clear infrastructural or social purpose. Further, its definition of such purposes specifically excludes any projects in which private, profit-driven players participate. The minister responsible for the LARR Bill&rsquo;s passage, Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh, has rightly rejected these parts of the committee&rsquo;s recommendations, pointing out that &ldquo;industrialisation and urbanisation have become inevitable and desirable&rdquo;.

Public-private purpose

The fourth-quarter corporate results for the financial year 2011-12 are in, and they are not entirely reassuring. Most visibly, sales growth has continued to shrink, according to a sample of 1,476 companies compiled by the BS Research Bureau. As Table 1 shows, the trend over the past eight quarters is for year-on-year growth to decline. In Q4, 2011-12, it declined particularly sharply.

StatsGuru-21-May-12

AICC General Secretary Rahul Gandhi was in Chhattisgarh on a day-long visit on Friday. And, as is considered customary on such occasions in the Congress, the party&rsquo;s local leaders swung into action, papering the route planned for Mr Gandhi&rsquo;s convoy with banners and posters that featured their photographs prominently, along, of course, with that of the Congress&rsquo; heir-apparent. So much so that the party&rsquo;s senior leaders apparently left no room anywhere for those associated with the Youth Congress &mdash; taking over every hoarding and wall on the way. Naturally, the Youth Congress&rsquo; leaders &ndash; who are, after all, Mr Gandhi&rsquo;s special province &ndash; couldn&rsquo;t pass up the chance to bring their faces to his attention. They were left with no alternative but to affix posters with their photographs to sewer pipes lying near the main stadium. The pipes had been left there by the municipal corporation, waiting to be used in some project.

Business Standard

Business Standard

Page 889 - Business Standard