Companies like to make claims about being the biggest, the fastest, and so on but most are careful to authenticate their claims from independent sources. Mohan Meakin claims that its popular dark rum brand Old Monk is the world&rsquo;s largest selling rum. According to which database? Strangely, two officially-designated spokespeople were unable to cite the source. One claimed the company&rsquo;s website was under construction so he wasn&rsquo;t in a position to say anything. The other referred the caller back to the first person. Yet, both agreed to the fact of Old Monk&rsquo;s leadership and provide the same sales data for 2011 of 8.4 million cases.

Rum facts

Business Standard

The High Commissioner of a western country who has served in India before, recently called on Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee. After talking for a while, the envoy observed that things had changed a lot in India since he was last here in 1983. &ldquo;1983...well, not so much has changed,&rdquo; said the finance minister contemplatively. &ldquo;I was the finance minister then; I am the finance minister now.

Not much change since 1983

The cricket stadium in Dharamshala will host its first ever one-day international match early next year, but during a recent cricket match between the Members of Parliament and British parliamentarians, the guests had a tough time. The Indian squad was led by BJP MP Anurag Thakur, son of Himachal Pradesh chief minister, and among the 11-member team was Mohammed Azharuddin, the former Indian skipper. When the visitors realised that Azharuddin was also in the team, they were demoralised and rightly so because the former skipper made century in little over 40 balls and then he chose to retire from the game. When it came to bowling, Thakur, a former cricketer himself, took four quick wickets, making it difficult for the guests to even reach near the total score. The team of Indian MPs won the match by 56 runs. The match was shown live on DD sports and the official commentator of the match was BJP MP and spokesperson Rajiv Pratap Rudy.

Azharuddin scares British MPs

Philosopher George Santayana&rsquo;s prediction that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it is coming eerily true in the jungles of east and central India, where state governments have encouraged Maoist terror by succumbing to serial hostage deals. The kidnapping of Sukma district collector Alex Paul Menon in Chhattisgarh last weekend came just days after the Maoists in Odisha released an Italian tour operator in return for the handing over of 27 imprisoned members of their group. Odisha legislator and Biju Janata Dal leader Jhina Hikaka, meanwhile, was released on Wednesday after an extended captivity &mdash; one that did not seem to have caused various state governments to draw the obvious lesson of urgently tightening security measures. The Maoist groups in neighbouring Chhattisgarh were quick to read the message from this softening of the state; they are now holding Mr Menon in anticipation of more prisoner releases.

Hostage to blackmail

To many who remember the politics of the late 1980s, this is a worryingly familiar moment for India. The two periods have several common features: a rudderless government, an insurgent anti-corruption movement, and weakness on the external economic front. The sudden recurrence in the national conversation of the totemic issue of those times, the quarter-century-old Bofors kickback scandal, is thus almost fortuitous.

The shadow of the guns

This refers to A K Bhattacharya&rsquo;s column &ldquo;The importance of being Basu&rdquo; (Raisina Hill, April 24). The government&rsquo;s move to allow academics to play a real role in policy-making is welcome. This will serve as a test of the theoretical knowledge that these scholars possess. Also given their knowledge, they are better placed than an average bureaucrat to assess problems in the system and come up with various methodologies to tackle them. But anyone who has had no exposure to the way the government and its functionaries work could find himself attracting controversies, much like Kaushik Basu did.

Letter: Academics in governance

It is interesting to see the way in which banks are reacting to the Reserve Bank of India&rsquo;s credit policy announcement. Some banks have cut the lending and deposit rates for select maturities. Others have preferred to cut the lending rates by specified percentage points, keeping the deposit rates unchanged. This is an era of deregulation &mdash; which helps banks make their own assessment of market needs, keeping in mind the resources available to them. For sure, deregulation is achieving the intended purpose.

Letter: Deregulation works

This refers to the news report &ldquo;Demand for seats in lower rung B-schools to dip further&rdquo; (April 26). All India Council for Technical Education Chairman has asked colleges to add value. I think the well-wishers of India do a disservice with their zeal. We have seen how a dilution of the merit criterion has eroded competitiveness in top institutes as more and more students seek admissions abroad at the graduation level itself. Similarly, objection to Right to Education (RTE) has been mistaken for a desire to maintain elitism at the cost of an inclusive society. There is little understanding of the anxiety surrounding admissions and competition.

Letter: Adding value

Summer internships are required to provide student a real-time working atmosphere of corporate industry. Enormous debts faced by nearly every sector is leading to non-payment of salaries for months, wage cuts, no hikes and shelving off enough work force. So it is very necessary for the intern/trainee to be flexible enough with a congenial attitude towards work and an acceptance to work even in the grave market situations. So even a bit of an opportunity to get an exposure into corporate world must be opted at hand.

Student's corner

In its latest recommendations on spectrum auctions, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India wants the Department of Telecom (DoT) to consult the ministries of finance and law on various points of law and rules. This is standard, but the new point is that this time, DoT has also been told to seek the advice of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), a reflection that the regulator is leaving nothing to chance.

RBI on call

A BSNL customer has subscribed to a facility that gives him news alerts at 7 p m on his cell phone. So is he being updated with the latest breaking news? No, being BSNL, the state-owned telecom firm sends out headlines from the news that would have appeared in in the morning the very same day.

Yesterday's news

Microsoft Word&rsquo;s spell-check, that tool much blessed by writers and editors, is politically correct when it comes to the spelling of the names of Indian locations. But it is often behind the times. So, if you want to know how many hs and ts are there in Chhattisgarh, the state that was carved out of Madhya Pradesh in 2000, Word is a handy reference point. It&rsquo;s the same with Jharkhand, formerly part of Bihar. But Word continues to recognise Uttaranchal, the UP breakaway, rather than Uttarakhand, the name the state was officially given in 2007. This even when it recognises Bengaluru, the new name for Bangalore that was proposed in 2005 but is still to be officially notified. So, no surprises that Odisha, the new name for Orissa that was notified this year, still gets a little red squiggle under it.

Spell checks

It is surprising that the economic importance of keeping the cost of infrastructure low for the sake of the people is still lost on our planners (&ldquo;Telecom shares plunge on spectrum fear,&rdquo; April 24). China is the manufacturing epicentre because its land, water, power and transport don&rsquo;t suffer from predatory taxation or benchmarking, and the economy benefits from this competitiveness. In the US, the price of energy is low and adjusted by purchasing power parity. An Indian consumer, on the other hand, pays almost 40 times of what an American consumer pays.

Letters: Price points

Apropos K Venkataraman&rsquo;s letter &ldquo;The Murthys at Raisina Hill&rdquo; (April 28), may I suggest Gopalkrishna Gandhi as another worthy candidate for the post of president of India. Gandhi amply satisfies all the requirements to take charge of the esteemed office since he is highly erudite, well below the age of 70 and has a distinguished and an unimpeachable record as an administrator, a diplomat and a governor. He also happens to be the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, who never sought any position of power in his lifetime.

Letters: A Gandhi as president

This refers to the report &ldquo;Important reforms coming in 6 months: Kaushik Basu&rdquo; (April 23). Basu&rsquo;s statement is timely; however, the real reform that needs to be brought in is the one in our electoral system. The nation&rsquo;s progress on most fronts, be it economic (tax reforms), national security (the setting up of the National Counter-Terror Centre) or strategic foreign policy (the vote against Sri Lanka in the United Nations Human Rights Council), is suffering precisely because of the fractured political verdict that our electoral system yields. This, in turn, gives the government the ready excuse of &ldquo;coalition dharma&rdquo; whenever it is questioned on its inability to take bold decisions. We cannot expect major and effective reforms in any sphere until we usher in electoral reforms because, in India, political interests have always overpowered and sidelined larger national interests.

Letters: Where's the real reform?

Are several senior ministers stepping down? In an echo of the Kamaraj Plan of 1963, are they choosing to leave a moribund government for an all-powerful party? Are those out of favour being forced out by a newly assertive prime minister or an angry Congress president? In the absence of any real developments, the answers to all these questions are a mixture of rumour and conjecture, not the stuff of news.

Reshuffle hints

The announcement by Standard &amp; Poor&rsquo;s (S&amp;P) yesterday to cut its outlook for India from stable to negative should cause no surprise, even though it comes barely five days after a similar exercise by Moody&rsquo;s, which had retained its outlook on India as stable. It is not unusual for credit rating agencies to differ from each other in their assessments, and not much should be read into this divergence.

A call for action

&ldquo;In the Food Assurance Scheme, we found that aggregate food availability is high. So if one person works, his entire family receives adequate food.

Should food be distributed via MGNREGS?

Accusations of policy paralysis engulfing the United Progressive Alliance at the Centre are now being echoed by the states. A senior Uttar Pradesh cadre bureaucrat recently admitted to the trend before a select gathering in Lucknow. He said officials were now apprehensive of taking decisions, since they ran the risk of being blamed for granting benefits to a particular party. &ldquo;Any policy decision will benefit one party or the other, but it does not mean that it was done with ulterior motive or due to some favour,&rdquo; he rued.

Paralysed by fear

On a Jet Airways flight from Bangalore to Chandigarh via New Delhi, Royal Challengers Bangalore director Siddharth Mallya, who was travelling with his team for a match in Mohali, put himself in an embarrassing situation. At the New Delhi stopover, the cleaning staff boarded the aircraft ahead of a crew change. At that point, Mallya decided to use the washroom. Though his father owns Kingfisher Airlines, the younger Mallya was evidently unaware that washrooms are out of bounds when an aircraft is being cleaned. He soon found out why when he squirted some liquid soap on his hands but the taps turned out to be dry. Flushed with anger, he had to be rescued by a crew member with a bottle of mineral water.

Jet-setter?

This refers to the edited excerpt from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh&rsquo;s speech on Civil Services Day (&ldquo;We cannot have a 100% risk-averse bureaucracy,&rdquo; April 22). In the initial period after Independence, bureaucrats did their work freely and fearlessly, and ministers valued their opinions while taking decisions. This was because both bureaucrats and politicians were dedicated to the common goal of serving the people. However, things have changed drastically. Politicians today are mostly self-serving and corrupt, and bureaucrats have to abide by them. With top officials being arrested for their alleged involvement in the 2G spectrum scam, hopefully, bureaucrats will realise the grave consequences of being yes-men. Though the prime minister is right in urging civil servants to show &ldquo;boldness&rdquo; in decision-making, he, too, needs to show courage and introduce key financial sector Bills in Parliament without any more delays.

Business Standard

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