With clouds of uncertainty returning both in India and abroad, investors are once again taking refuge in defensive stocks. No wonder, shares of consumer-focused companies are back in the limelight. Shares of ITC, HUL, Nestle India and GSK Consumer touched their all-time high levels in Thursday&rsquo;s trading session.

Taking shelter in defensives

Business Standard

The government may be under severe financial pressure but you would never think of it if you visited the ministry of information and broadcasting. The ministry has been the beneficiary of a makeover of sorts with all the lights and shades having been changed everywhere &mdash; in the bureaucrats&rsquo; rooms, the corridors, even the toilets. This is worthy of comment only because the lamps and shades that were jettisoned were all in functional order and hardly old enough to warrant replacement. Clearly, the government has misplaced its priorities, one bureaucrat commented wryly, because it chose to spend on fixtures that did not need replacing instead of spending money where it is really needed.

Lights out

How did the retrospective amendment and other intrusive changes in tax law proposed in this year&rsquo;s Budget come about? According to North Block insiders, the opposition uproar over black money provided Central Board of Direct Taxes officials a perfect reason to press for changes that give them unprecedented discretionary powers. The old reasoning that fear induces evaders to pay was set out before senior bureaucrats and the finance minister before the Budget &mdash; and the rest was easy since these senior officials and the finance minister also understood that resisting such suggestions could lay them open to doubt.

Chain reaction

The socio-economic caste census (SECC-2011) that is currently underway is meant to assess the population that is actually below the poverty line (BPL) in the country. It is based on exclusion criteria under which households possessing specified assets are automatically excluded from the list. The crucial difference between past BPL censuses (as the SECC is also called) and the current one, apart from the methodology, is that caste is being analysed for the first time on a nationwide scale. All fair so far. But, as our correspondent experienced, the enumerator is not only unaware of such a clause he does not even ask questions related to castes. Told that this is an important clause in the census, the enumerator merely said he was unaware of it. If this is the state in a supposedly upscale locality in the national capital, it may be worth wondering about the quality of data being collected from small towns and cities.

Caste out

Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar&rsquo;s criticism of the UPA government&rsquo;s policies in a letter to the prime minister is an eye-opener for anyone working on the economic development of India. It&rsquo;s amply clear that without substantial growth in farm incomes, emerging market economies like India will not see sustainable economic growth along with rapid poverty alleviation. The recent ban on exports of key agricultural commodities like cotton, sugar and milk only shows that policy-making in New Delhi has internal contradictions and is anti-growth. Such a ban is an indirect tax on agriculture.

Letters: Listen to Sharad Pawar

In about a month from now, the country&rsquo;s ever-bulging foodgrain stockpile will bloat further to over 75 million tonnes, a record amount. This will be nearly two-and-a-half times the stipulated maximum food buffer. Worse, it will outstrip the available warehousing capacity (covered and open) of 63 million tonnes by a wide margin. Even today, a good part of the present food inventory of over 53 million tonnes is lying in the open, under fragile plastic sheets; pakka storage space is only around 45.5 million tonnes. With over 30 million tonnes more wheat from the fresh crop slated to land up in the Centre&rsquo;s grain kitty in the next four weeks, the problem will only get worse &mdash; with the possibility of rot in the monsoon season, and exposure to insects and rats.

Granaries to graveyards

Isn&rsquo;t Shankar Acharya in &ldquo;The unravelling&rdquo; (April 12) being less than fair when he calls seven per cent GDP growth and 34 per cent of GDP aggregate investment a disaster in a particularly difficult global economic situation? And more so when we compare these figures to nine per cent GDP growth and 38 per cent of GDP aggregate investment at a time when a sustained global boom was &ldquo;lifting all boats&rdquo; across the globe. It&rsquo;s a pretty good performance &mdash; perhaps the best in today&rsquo;s world.

Letters: Beyond the gloom

Apropos the report &ldquo;Branches of loss-making PSU banks may be closed&rdquo; (April 10), the government is right in scaling down the operations of loss-making branches of public sector banks (PSBs).

Letters: Banking on profit

The government&rsquo;s chief statistician, T C A Anant, had the embarrassing duty of informing the public that the January figures for the index of industrial production or IIP were, in fact, a massive overestimate.

Death of data discipline

There are a wide range of unique and innovative health insurance plans that cover much more than basic hospitalisation. From the popular family floater plan on &lsquo;indemnity&rsquo; basis, where the insured is reimbursed costs incurred to policies covering outpatient expenses, to policies providing specialised cover for critical illness, the choices are wide. There are 22 general insurance and standalone health insurance companies offering a variety of health insurance plans.

General Insurance: Bhargav Dasgupta

In the past year, a tsunami of intellectual property (IP) lawsuits has meant that the battle for market share in the personal technology space has shifted to the courts. Apple and Samsung are perhaps the most high-profile opponents. The two companies are in face-offs across at least 10 national jurisdictions, where they have sued and counter-sued each other for diverse patent violations. At last count, there were over 30 cases involving these two companies.

The era of patent wars

Thanks to new-age technology, branch managers in remote areas have come under the scrutiny of their bosses sitting miles away in the big cities. That&rsquo;s because it was discovered that some of the branches were opened by the security guard and the branch managers chose to attend the office only occasionally. As a result, the government has asked banks to ensure branch managers mark their presence in office through some means of biometric identification.

Banking on biometrics

BJP Chief Whip in the Lok Sabha Ramesh Bais found himself in deep trouble for dragging party President Nitin Gadkari into a controversial mining deal in Chhattisgarh. Recently, a report from the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) indicted the Chhattisgarh government for awarding a coal block development and mining contract to a Nagpur-based firm at a significantly low price. The opposition party alleged that the firm&rsquo;s owner was &ldquo;close&rdquo; to Gadkari, which is why the rules were by-passed. Bais swung into action, pronounced the CAG findings authentic and grilled the Raman Singh government. In doing so, however, he inadvertently put Gadkari centre stage, turning the spotlight on the groupism within the party and providing his detractors in the party a handy club with which to beat him. &ldquo;If closeness to Gadkari was the criterion for allotting mines, then I should also get one,&rdquo; Bais is reported to have said.

Close call

All the premier B-schools are suffering from faculty crunch, and this problem will be aggravated once they start to take over the newer ones. What older B-schools can do is to function as a mentor for the new ones so that the latter does not face the same problem which the older once had faced at the beginning. This will assist new B-schools to stand on their own foot and compete with the older ones, thus enhancing their quality and gradually becoming stronger.

Students' corner

Coalition politics creates double standards, as the Congress recently demonstrated. Recently, a Congress spokesperson let loose a barrage of criticism against BJP Chief Minister Narendra Modi for transferring 68 officers including 50 IAS officers in the state. It was &ldquo;well thought out strategy&rdquo; and &ldquo;advance planning&rdquo; in the run up to the year-end Assembly polls in Gujarat, the spokesperson alleged. Yet the spokesperson was dismissive when questioned about a similar move by West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. Unable to explain why its ally Trinamool Congress was transferring officers at whim (including the upright police detective Damayanti Sen), the Congress spokesperson chose to ignore the comment that Bengal, too, was headed for Panchayat polls.

Coalition blinkers

Apropos your edit &ldquo;You have the floor&rdquo; (April 10), given the way big cities are growing, your advice of cumulative facility drains, piping, public transport and so on may be a big help. However, building more floors to accommodate an exploding population requires digging deeper into the earth that will cause a depletion of ground water resources. This would be more dangerous than reducing the per square foot cost of buildings. We must consider decongesting of cities and build basic amenities in villages to reverse the flow of population. Such an initiative will not only protect living conditions in villages but ensure that enough labour is available for agriculture.

Letters: Floor price

I agree with Mihir Sharma that in the long term we would have gained much as a society (&ldquo;As bad as it gets&rdquo;, April 10). Specifically, I would list three areas in which we have strengthened our commitments to democracy: the gift of markets &ldquo;that increase living standards and choices&rdquo; (free trade agreements); the gift of political institutions where &ldquo;power flows from the consent of the governed&rdquo; (Right to Information and so on); and the gift of social beliefs &ldquo;that encourage tolerance and individual autonomy&rdquo; (press freedom and respect for the judiciary).

Letters: '3G's of democracy

With reference to &ldquo;No more Paan Singhs&rdquo; (Chinese Whispers, April 10), it is unfortunate that the Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister is unable to focus on the fundamental issue that caused a capable soldier to turn into an enemy of the state. The chief minister highlights the fact that his government has eliminated dacoits. The focus should have been on improving the interface of the administration with the public and actually working for the welfare of the people.

Letters: Will versus welfare

In the article &ldquo;Comptroller &amp; Activist General?&rsquo;(Raisina Hill, April 10), A K Bhattacharya has rightly pointed out that the institution has been growing from strength to strength and equipping itself to perform the role expected of it, despite the constraints that are normal in the growth path of institutions with &ldquo;watchdog&rdquo; responsibilities. The efforts by the present incumbent and his predecessors to sharpen the available tools by infusing expertise into the organisation and training and educating cadres have brought about professionalism in the performance of audit function and improved the confidence of staff. If similar initiatives had come from his counterparts heading other government departments and public sector or statutory organisations, the agony the present United Progressive Alliance-II government is suffering would have been much less.

Letters: CAG as role model

The Reserve Bank of India bears a responsibility to control inflation and promote growth, one it shares with the government in New Delhi. The Centre has continually shirked its responsibility. The Budget presented for 2012-13, while claiming to focus on fiscal responsibility, leaves much undone. Its projections for growth, revenues and deficits depend on the government taking tough decisions &mdash; &ldquo;biting the bullet&rdquo;, the prime minister had called it.

Business Standard

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