The column &ldquo;Standing instructions&rdquo; (Swot, May 10) was interesting and informative. In government offices, too, there was no distinction between men and women standing up when a senior walked in. But at house parties, the ladies did not have to get up.

Letters: Office habits die hard

Business Standard

The UPA might be regretful of the scope of the right to information (RTI) it introduced, but at least one government agency - and the country&rsquo;s premier investigating agency, no less - apparently is quite thankful for its existence on occasion. In Chhattisgarh, the Central of Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is arming itself with the RTI to extract documents from Chhattisgarh&rsquo;s health department. The CBI is probing a case of alleged financial irregularities in the purchase of medical equipment for prevention of malaria. Despite repeated demands, the investigating officials have failed to get the documents they needed from Chhattisgarh&rsquo;s health department officials, and eventually filed an RTI application.

RTI's unusual fans

Outgoing Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, or Trai, Chairman J S Sarma does not feel, apparently, like cutting the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) any slack. Any errors, real or imaginary, in the DoT&rsquo;s questions for Trai have been meticulously pointed out.

Sarma's parting shot

It looks like the proxy war between Arvind Kejriwal and the government has spilled over, now, into the pages of Tehelka. The magazine&rsquo;s cover story on Montek Singh Ahluwalia featured an assertion, sourced to Mr Kejriwal, that Mr Ahluwalia had launched a scheme to privatise Delhi&rsquo;s water board that one of his sons then benefited from, as a consultant. The magazine eventually had to post an online retraction when they were proved false by correspondence freely available online, which showed that the Delhi government had launched the scheme &mdash; and that Mr Ahluwalia&rsquo;s son had merely worked for the water board, many years after Mr Ahluwalia left the finance ministry, and not in its privatisation-related efforts, either.

Kejriwal slips up

This refers to the edit &ldquo;The anti-reform Congress&rdquo; (May 14). There&rsquo;s no doubt that the euro-zone crisis and the weakening rupee have contributed towards slowing growth. However, the government cannot wash its hands of its task to bring the economy back on track. One wonders why we have an experienced economist at the helm of affairs when he can&rsquo;t implement a single measure to stop the growth rate from declining. The government can blame Mamata Banerjee for thwarting its efforts to introduce reforms in the retail sector and the new Land Acquisition Bill. But who can it blame for the delay in the passage of the Insurance Bill? Your edit rightly concludes that the government will continue to flounder till Congress&rsquo; leaders develop a sense of urgency and recall their commitment to reform. For now, the party seems in no mood for doing so. Perhaps it is expecting a miracle in the 2014 general elections.

Letters: UPA: Counting on a miracle?

My father and uncle started a company in 1992. They took a bank loan, giving my house as collateral. My father resigned from the firm&rsquo;s directorship in 1996. Despite his repeated requests, the bank did not release my house and kept enhancing the company&rsquo;s debt limit based on it. In 2000, the company became a non-performing asset. The bank has since been trying to recover its dues from our property.

Banking: Prashant Joshi

Stability is not the hallmark of the Indian government&rsquo;s trade policies. This is true particularly of trade in agricultural products, which is switched on or switched off frequently &mdash; often at inappropriate times. The slew of recent decisions regarding the liberalisation of exports of agricultural commodities, such as sugar, cotton, onion, milk casein and staple cereals like wheat and rice, provides ample evidence of this. Curiously, most of these decisions were taken not by the ministries concerned, but by groups of ministers (GoMs) or at a still higher level. Such an ill-conceived approach towards exports helps neither to gainfully tap the global market to fetch better prices, nor to steady domestic commodity markets. Even an administrative decision like doing away with the minimum export price (MEP) for onion was taken at a meeting chaired by the prime minister.

Destroying farm exports

It is impossible to feel optimistic about Air India without completely suspending rational judgement. Every time the state-owned airline looks like it might be slowly turning its fate around, it runs into trouble, usually self-inflicted. The latest round of flight cancellations by the airline will be particularly damaging; India&rsquo;s flyers are coming to detest uncertainty, and they will be willing to pay a greater-than-ever premium to ensure that the flight they&rsquo;re booking at least takes off. The pilots&rsquo; strike that has caused the cancellations is a reflection of two things: first, the inability of the airline&rsquo;s pilots to realise the perils that the company is in, and their addiction to blackmailing the government. And, second, the incomplete and ill-judged nature of the merger between the erstwhile Indian Airlines and Air India.

Your move, Mr Singh

The continual troubles of the debt-ridden aviation sector is supposed to have made banks cautious about further lending to distressed airlines. Banks are overexposed to the sector, which has led to many questions about the lending patterns. During an international conference outside India, the chairman of a public sector bank was asked to explain why his bank was lending to the aviation sector knowing fully that it could become a bad loan one day.

Air India's secret

The Planning Commission&rsquo;s estimation of poverty might be being hotly debated, and used to attack the government. But that hasn&rsquo;t stopped even opposition politicians from using it if convenient for them. In a recent meeting between Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia and Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, the chief minister was quick to take credit for bringing down poverty in his state using the same indicators for which the Commission has been severely criticised. Responding to this, Ahluwalia urged the chief minister to convey the same analysis to other senior leaders of the BJP, who have been in the forefront of this criticism. It appears the suggestion was happily agreed to by Chouhan. Whether he will actually speak out, however, remains an open question. After all, being seen as taking a stance against your own party&rsquo;s stand, even if it is right, is not common in either the BJP or the Congress.

Poverty and courage

Janata Party President Subramanian Swamy may be troubling the UPA government, especially Home Minister P Chidambaram, with his incessant salvos, but it appears he is doing a great service to some officers in the government. One bureaucrat said he doesn&rsquo;t get much time to follow the newspapers or TV, but is still updated with the current news. All he does every morning is see what Swamy is saying on Twitter, and this tells him what the &ldquo;big story&rdquo; of the day is. He apparently learnt about recent discussions on Chidambaram&rsquo;s son&rsquo;s alleged role in the Aircel-Maxis deal from one such tweet.

The newsmaker

German pharma major Bayer is contemplating challenging a government order allowing Hyderbad-based manufacturer Natco Pharma to sell the generic version of its anti-cancer drug, Nexavar, for about Rs 8,880 a month, or roughly 3% of the price tag of Rs 2.8 lakh that the MNC put on its own product.

Should MNCs be allowed to sell life-saving drugs at market driven prices?

This refers to Ron Somers article &ldquo;Indian economy: Reform or perish&rdquo; (May 10). More than economic reforms, the youth in India is keen on seeing administrative reforms. Once the country&rsquo;s administration is free of bureaucratic red tape and corruption, the economy will automatically get back on its growth path. Since a large section of the population is engaged in agricultural activities, needless to say, reforms in agriculture are more important than anything else at this point in time.

Letters: What the young want

The Reserve Bank of India&rsquo;s (RBI&rsquo;s) restrictions on the operation of the Exchange Earner&rsquo;s Foreign Currency Account, compelling holders to convert forex into rupees to the stipulated extent, are intended to augment the supply of foreign exchange to the market and arrest the depreciation of the rupee. The underlying forex is already with the authorised dealers and there will be no addition to the dollar supplies by the conversion. But, the RBI&rsquo;s credibility as a liberalising central bank marching towards full convertibility has taken a beating.

Letters: A liberalising central bank?

Your edit &ldquo;Bitterest pill&rdquo; (May 11) rightly presses on the need for urgent reforms and regulations in the pharmaceutical sector. The Central Drug Standard Control Organisation has failed in checking the quality of drugs that are available in India. It is alarming to note that drugs that are not permitted to go on sale in other countries find their way easily into the Indian market. Foreign drug-makers should not be allowed to further their interests and sales at the cost of our people. Indeed the government should examine the drawbacks in the approval procedure and investigate the violations charged in the report of the Parliamentary Committee on Health and Family Welfare.

Letters: Drug abuse

India&rsquo;s airlines are, unquestionably, in trouble. This is in spite of the fact that the number of passengers in Indian skies has grown steadily, as compared with passenger growth in the rest of the world; Table 1 shows the enviable passenger growth Indian airlines have racked up in comparison with their global competitors.

StatsGuru-14-May-12

The green bench of the Himachal Pradesh High Court has ordered Jaiprakash Associates Ltd to dismantle the thermal power unit at the company&rsquo;s cement plant campus in Bagheri, near Solan (Himachal Pradesh), and also pay Rs 100 crore as damages for obtaining environmental clearance in a &ldquo;dubious&rdquo; manner. The bench, moreover, turned down the company&rsquo;s plea that, since the thermal plant was already functioning, it should not be demolished. Though this judicial decree is path-breaking in some respects, instances of companies being asked to shut down their running units on ecological considerations are not that rare any more. Not too long ago, the Supreme Court barred the French multinational Lafarge from supplying limestone from Meghalaya to a cement plant in Bangladesh on environmental grounds. The Supreme Court&rsquo;s forest bench took exception to tribal land in the East Khasi Hill District being transferred to the French company, and ordered mining to be stopped.

Greening the white water

The United Progressive Alliance&rsquo;s second government, which has become almost synonymous with inaction, is accustomed to citing its unruly allies as responsible for its inability to make policy. Major reforms like foreign direct investment (FDI) in retail or a land acquisition law, for example, have been put on hold because alliance partners like Mamata Banerjee have declared themselves uncomfortable with their passage. Yet, in the Cabinet&rsquo;s treatment of the long-awaited insurance Bill, it becomes clear that the Congress party needs no outside agency to catalyse its paralysis; it is capable of holding up reform perfectly well on its own. The Insurance Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2008, has been hanging fire since that year; industry observers have said the Bill is crucial for mobilising more funds for that sector, reducing its costs of operation, and modernising mergers and acquisitions. On Thursday, however, the Cabinet deferred its passage.

The anti-reform Congress

On Friday, more clearly than ever before, India&rsquo;s political class revealed its deepest, darkest fear: that someone, somewhere, is smiling. In an enviable feat of cross-party unanimity in this partisan and divided age, India&rsquo;s parliamentarians decided that a cartoon by that unparalleled chronicler of the birth of independent India, Shankar, was too offensive for a government-sanctioned textbook on modern Indian history. The cartoon, from 1949, showed Jawaharlal Nehru and B R Ambedkar whipping a snail labelled &ldquo;Constitution&rdquo;; it was Shankar&rsquo;s comment on how long the Constitution-drafting process was taking. It was more than harmless enough, and more than informative enough, to find a place in a history textbook.

Open to ridicule 

The otherwise cacophonous and rambunctious Houses of Parliament were witness to some unusual melodious strains on the occasion of the 150th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore. With Parliament paying a tribute to the great poet, philosopher and patriot, the Members of Parliament (MPs) cutting across party lines recited his poetry and spoke of his all-embracing philosophy. The MPs from West Bengal spoke about Tagore, as Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Arun Jaitley put it in &ldquo;sweet&rdquo; Bengali.

Singing a different tune

The alleged &ldquo;gas leak&rdquo; in Parliament, which led to the adjournment of the proceedings of the Rajya Sabha on Thursday and had its members on their feet, was, in fact, the stench emanating from a six-foot long blocked drain pipe. Maintenance of this Lutyens&rsquo; era building is an enormous challenge for the Central Public Works Department, which is responsible for Parliament&rsquo;s upkeep. The alleged drain, say sources, has not been cleaned in the past 60 years. On the last occasion when a stench led to opening a part of this drain, pots, pans and pressure cookers were found clogging the drain.

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