I am 18 and in my first year of college. I have been working in holidays to save for my future, and have saved Rs 50,000 in the past three years. Of this, I put Rs 20,000 in fixed deposits (according to my father&rsquo;s suggestion). I have the remaining in cash. I try to keep my expenditure limited to my pocket money of Rs 1,500 a month. Please help me utilise my money better for the future.

Financial Planning: Malhar Majumder

Business Standard

This refers to the report &ldquo;WNS quells Nashik strike&rdquo; (May 3). The government has intervened to defuse the crisis, even as the employees have been restrained from forming a union. The employers threatened to withdraw operations from Nashik since their customers, too, had expressed their reluctance to continue in the city. Earlier, during the Maruti strike, the employers were attempting to foist their union on the employees in spite of their repeated and prolonged agitation for their own right to a union. The state government sided with the management and ultimately the leaders were bought out. Even during the General Motors workers&rsquo; strike in Gujarat, the Narendra Modi government and the management successfully stalled the formation of a union in the factory for over a year.

Letters: Unholy unions?

An index of the deep frustration among bureaucrats on Raisina Hill can be had from the opinion of a senior North Block mandarin. He&rsquo;s hoping the European crisis deepens. Not because he has anything against Europeans but he reckons that a crisis there will provoke a deeper crisis in India and force the political establishment to promote the many pro-reform policies that are stuck for one reason or another. After all, he reasons, it was the balance of payments crisis that precipitated the end of the licence-permit raj and put India on a higher growth trajectory ever since.

Crisis planning

Apropos the edit &ldquo;They are spending&rdquo; (May 3), your conclusion that consumer sentiment seems to contradict any sense that the India story is stuttering despite the gloom about macroeconomic fundamentals is inconclusive and wrong. The improved performance of the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector only indicates that the class of people who can afford to buy FMCG products has been on the rise thanks to the widening income gap and increasing purchasing power. This only proves that the demand for such goods is inelastic and that there are people who can afford these goods and much more irrespective of price rise. This does not in any way reflect the economy&rsquo;s performance in terms of price rise, productivity, employment, poverty levels, infrastructural development, GDP growth, exports, imports and so on. The government&rsquo;s economic policies help only the rich and the middle class and this has been validated by the better performance of FMCG products.

Letters: Who's spending?

A discussion of a serious issue like the Marriage Laws Amendment Bill gave rise to much facetious mirth in the Upper House of Parliament. When Congress MP Shadi Lal Batra, rose to speak on the issue, a senior member pointed out that it was quite apt that &ldquo;Shadi&rdquo; Lal ji was addressing the house on the issue, punning on his first name. BJD member Baishnab Parida even went on to quote prominent Hindi movie titles, underlining the elation before marriage and the depression after marriage. (Maine Pyar Kiya in contrast to Maine Pyar Kyun Kiya.) It was left to women MPs Jaya Bachchan of the SP and DMK&rsquo;s Kanimozhi to raise the more pertinent points on how the Bill would impact women as far as alimony, maintenance and custody of children are concerned.

Maine joke kiya?

Ownership of foreign institutional investors (FIIs) in India&rsquo;s top 75 companies rose to 20.4 per cent in the quarter ended March 31 2012 from 19.5 per cent in the quarter ended December 31, 2011, according to Morgan Stanley. During the same period, promoters&rsquo; stake in these firms fell to 53.1 per cent from 54 per cent.

FIIs buy, promoters sell 

A hopeful start to 2012 has been belied. The West is slipping back into recession, as Table 1 shows. The US and Germany remain strong, but many other powerhouses &mdash; even the UK &mdash; have begun to contract. And, as Table 2 makes clear, there is little hope for a recovery soon. The Purchasing Managers&rsquo; Index (PMI) for the euro zone, for example, are solidly below 50 for both manufacturing and services &mdash; even for German manufacturing.

StatsGuru: 05-May-2012

A gang of six swindlers, posing as investigation officers of the income-tax department, raided a person&rsquo;s house in Saharanpur of Uttar Pradesh last month. Using a fake letter and identity cards issued by the department, they impounded Rs 11 lakh and demanded a bribe for closing the case. The police caught two of them but the mastermind of the plot is absconding. The police sought the income-tax department&rsquo;s help to catch him and his photograph was duly circulated on its website.

Tax swindle in reverse

Even Tagore&rsquo;s memory will be the subject of some poribarton (change) in the new regime in Bengal. Instead of the usual Prabhati (morning) function that begins at 7 a m, the poet&rsquo;s birth anniversary celebration on May 8 this year has been rescheduled to 2 p m because Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee keeps late hours. Predictably, the Left has not missed the opportunity to take a dig at Banerjee on this issue. Leader of the Opposition Suryakanta Mishra commented, &ldquo;One can have problems waking up early but surely she can make an adjustment for one day.&rdquo; In fact, Mishra has written a letter to the chief minister&rsquo;s office requesting no break from the established tradition.

Change: A wake-up call

Self-proclaimed spiritual guru Nirmal Baba may have hogged the attention of television channels for his dubious practices. But it is a claim-to-fame moment for the people of Daltonganj, a modest town in Jharkhand where the Baba spent his early days. Before the publicity Nirmal Baba received, the town was scarcely known outside of the state, its citizens thought. This, even though Member of Parliament and former Speaker of the Jharkhand Assembly Inder Singh Namdhari is a native of the town.

Daltonganj's spiritual links

Apropos the article &ldquo;The myth of coalition compulsions (May 3), it is misleading of Ravi Shanker Kapoor to say compulsory licensing for pharmaceutical products is restrictive. It is, in fact, just the opposite. Here is what the Brides Weekly Trade News Digest of March 14 says on the subject.

Letters: Patently right 

Your edit &ldquo;Releasing the captive&rdquo; (May 1) contains certain factual inaccuracies and some omissions. First, we would like to point out that coal blocks to the Sasan and Tilaiya ultra mega power projects (UMPPs) were the only blocks allotted through tariff-based competitive bidding. All other coal blocks were allotted without bidding.

Letters: Power of domestic coal 

Sitting in Germany, Felix Scheffler, head of Corporate Top+ and corporate quality management at Siemens AG has an important mandate. Top+ is a Siemens business excellence programme. He also coordinates among the key SMART hubs around the world and formulates the global strategy for the headquarters. He took time out during his trip to India for this interview. Edited excerpts.

SMART products meet local price levels and thereby ensure profitable business: Felix Scheffler

The increasing concern among policy makers about climate change is evident from the pre-Budget Economic Survey for 2011-12, read together with the report of the Planning Commission&rsquo;s sub-group for climate change in the 12th Plan, and the earlier National Action Plan for Climate Change. The 12th Plan (2012-17) will have to pay heed to the challenges thrown out by climate change in charting sustainable development. The sooner India faces up to them, the less the damage will be &mdash; although the costs will be substantial in any case. The Indian government already spends 2.8 per cent of GDP on programmes that have mitigation and adaptation relevance. Taken together, various climate change-related missions will cost well over Rs 2.5 lakh crore over the 12th Plan period and beyond.

Policy heats up

Once again, poverty estimations are creating a needless debate over what is a modest measurement problem. For many years since 1973, the government had followed a simple formula: if a household could not afford to buy a minimal number of calories and clothing for its members, it was deemed as a household below the Planning Commission poverty line. But there was one problem: survey respondents tend to systematically under-report their expenditure.

Estimating poverty properly

Twenty years ago, India was rocked by the first great post-liberalisation scandal. The questioning of Harshad Mehta in April 1992, and his arrest in November that year, had two major effects: it held back the development of India&rsquo;s bond market, and it pushed India towards major regulatory reform. Harshad Mehta and his associates were working an ingeniously simple scheme; they would siphon off funds from the inter-bank bond market to the stock market, where chosen shares would find their values being pushed up. He would sell high, and then the money that had inflated the share&rsquo;s value would be returned to the lending banks. However, the moment the shares stopped increasing in value, banks were left holding receipts that had sharply lost value.

Twenty years on 

Relations between Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and Bihar CM Nitish Kumar are not known to be friendly, though they are cordial. At a meeting of CMs to discuss the National Counter Terrorism Centre, photographers posted at the door saw Modi walk in and started clicking him. Soon after, they spotted Kumar. Some of them invited the two to pose together for a photograph. But Modi shook his head and walked inside. Indoors, somewhat pointedly, Modi himself walked up to Kumar to shake his hand and talk to him for three to four minutes. It seems this friendship is not meant to be in the public eye.

No public appearance

English is not India&rsquo;s mother tongue, but surely at least ministers need to have some familiarity with it? One Union minister &mdash; who has become a minister recently &mdash; persists in saying, &ldquo;I doesn&rsquo;t know&rdquo;. A colleague groaning about this said, &ldquo;Arre yaar, he says &lsquo;I doesn&rsquo;t know&rsquo; even in Cabinet meetings&rdquo;. Another minister (though not a Cabinet minister) from his party insists on wearing the smartest suits with jacket and tie &mdash; but with rubber chappals, because that is the example set by his leader.

English, not our cup of  tea

On April 11, tsunami alert was issued and withdrawn within 30 minutes. Senior officers at the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) were surprised to find out that the government was sending 80 soldiers to Andaman and Nicobar Islands for rescue operations. &ldquo;When we should react, the government remains quiet. And then, sometimes we overreact. We never get it right,&rdquo; said a senior scientist at NDMA.

Actions and reactions

PCP. This abbreviation reigns supreme at the recruitment firm I work for. P for presentation (&ldquo;Sloppy dressing, the candidate did not wear a tie and his coat was not stiff.&rdquo;). C for communication (&ldquo;Decent speaker though he confused coffin for closet when he said: &lsquo;I cleaned out the skeletons in the coffin&rsquo;.&rdquo;). P for potential (&ldquo;Has IT in his blood but changes jobs frequently, so low placeability.

The 'PCP' of recruitment 

The 20th annual general body meeting of the IT and ITES Industry Association of Andhra Pradesh (ITsAP), held in Hyderabad on Friday, unanimously elected V Rajanna as it&rsquo;s next president for the term 2012-14. He takes over this responsibility from ML Suresh, chief executive officer and director, Identis Tech Solutions. Rajanna has rich and varied experience of over two decades in the IT arena, and is currently the vice-president and regional head of TCS, Hyderabad.

Business Standard

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