This refers to Devangshu Datta&rsquo;s column &ldquo;Criminalising a minority&rdquo; (Viewpoint, February 25). The author restates the organised lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community&rsquo;s proposition that &ldquo;sexual orientation is hard-wired&rdquo;, whereas there is no hard proof of common genetic causes. The Kinsey Report criterion of &ldquo;at least&rdquo; one homosexual experience would misclassify impulsive or circumstantial behaviour as permanently homosexual. I am delighted that adult homosexual activity will not be selectively criminalised, but that does not make it natural. No other animal tries it, yet if I don&rsquo;t support experimentation disguised as &ldquo;bisexuality&rdquo;, &ldquo;liberals&rdquo; would burn me at the stake! The majority dreads the topic, but &ldquo;liberal opinion&rdquo; forces the media to present silence as a vote in its favour. Families matter in the Indian social context, in sharp contrast to the &ldquo;liberal&rdquo; West.

Letters: Gay abandon?

Business Standard

Tension between India&rsquo;s civilian and military leadership has steadily increased over the past few months and now appears to be at the highest it has been in decades. In his latest fusillade, the chief of army staff, General V K Singh, has said that he was offered a Rs 14 crore bribe by a retired army officer in order to clear the purchase of a set of armoured vehicles. He reported the incident to Defence Minister A K Antony; Mr Antony, speaking in Parliament, said that he was indeed told of the incident &ldquo;more than a year ago&rdquo;, but that the General did not wish to proceed further by himself, nor did he submit a written complaint for the ministry to act on. This drills a hole in the implication that General Singh had conveyed in his many communications to the media on the subject &mdash; that the civilian leadership was unconcerned about rampant corruption in defence procurement.

No ceasefire in sight 

In India, self-regulation is always at a premium, unless accompanied by a danda.

Should ad durations on TV shows be halved?

The breather from the Greek debt crisis might prove all too short-lived as another Club Med country appears to be in danger of catching the financial contagion: Spain. As Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy gets ready to present a deficit-cutting Budget on March 30, labour unions are preparing for a strike to protest against laws that make it easier to fire workers and cut wages. All this takes place against the backdrop of a meeting of euro zone finance ministers in Copenhagen on Friday to strengthen the region&rsquo;s &ldquo;financial firewall&rdquo; by raising the ceiling on bailout funding. Much of this is contingent on how far Spain is ready to bite the bullet of austerity. And the country is clearly struggling. Last month, it informed the European Union (EU) that it would miss its 2011 deficit reduction target of six per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) by as much as 250 basis points, in spite of an austerity plan.

Now, Spanish flu

In the two decades that disinvestment has been on the government&rsquo;s agenda, its purpose has been distorted. When the idea that the central government&rsquo;s stake in public sector undertakings (PSUs) be diluted was first suggested and implemented, the main motivation was to improve their efficiency. Disinvestment would lead to greater operational discipline, it was argued. Listing a PSU meant that it would be subject to the rules of the market, with the government turning from the command centre of the economy to just another shareholder, albeit one with control. This has not happened; and now disinvestment seems to be seen as just another way to raise resources for a cash-strapped exchequer. In the process, the companies themselves have suffered. They still follow government directives on their day-to-day operations that are supposedly in the economy&rsquo;s interest, not in their own. Yet little has been done to change that &mdash; till now.

Disciplining PSUs

In spite of sustained weakness in the macro-climate with rising non-performing assets (NPAs), asset restructuring and weak credit growth outlook, few voices have been raised on the long-term (two-year) outlook for Indian banks.

Macquarie Research calls the bluff on Indian banks

Governance failures and abuses happen across all three categories &mdash; public sector, family promoters and MNCs. Whoever the dominant shareholder is, minority shareholders are exposed to certain risks, and the higher the dominant shareholder's stake, crossing the various voting thresholds of 26%, 50% and 75%, the bigger the risks. Above 75% performance very clearly deteriorates in most, but not all, cases, says Espirito Santo Securities.

Ruthless Gullivers and helpless Lilliputs

B2B and B2C, common acronyms used for Business to Business and Business to Consumer firms, are pass&eacute;. The new buzz word is B2G. Brokerages are now using this new acronym to mark the companies that are doing business with and those whose business is directly connected with the government. With scams rocking the government, this business-to-government universe is going through a rough patch.

And now, B2G

This refers to Nivedita Mookerji and Dilasha Seth&rsquo;s report &ldquo;Foreign retail chains face protest in India&rdquo; (March 21). We need a cohesive Indian voice, which speaks in unison with local traders and is backed by the home ministry, to stop foreign trade unions like UNI Global Union from meddling in our country&rsquo;s internal affairs. These foreign trade unions are using India&rsquo;s huge market base to hit at their adversaries back home and have the support of Indian trade union leaders who can be bought easily with money and other incentives.

Letters: Keep the foreign hand away

In a seminar on transfer pricing, discussions revolved around how India has been borrowing best practices from around the world. For instance, in the recently introduced advance pricing agreements intended to reduce disputes, global practices may be followed, a consultant from Deloitte said, adding, &ldquo;but trust our tax department to add the Indian tadka to this global khichdi.

Global khichdi, Indian tadka

In the news report &ldquo;MPs question Army Chief&rsquo;s conduct&rdquo; (March 27), Jaswant Singh is quoted as saying that General V K Singh should have approached Defence Minister A K Antony about the bribe offered to him and not made a public statement. In fact, that is what General Singh did back in 2010. As reported elsewhere, he did inform the defence minister. But the curious thing is that Antony, a known paragon of rectitude, did not take any action until General Singh made the charge in an interview to The Hindu. Clearly, there is far more to the affair than meets the eye.

Letters: Defence mechanism

China&rsquo;s leadership is caught in turmoil which it would have greatly preferred to keep under wraps. The high-level succession later this year was to be smooth and rule-based &mdash; the latter for the first time. Instead, internecine conflicts have come out in the open in the most embarrassing way. A senior regional official &ndash; the police chief of Chongqing province, Wang Lijun &ndash; took temporary refuge in a nearby US consulate, fearing for his life after he told the state&rsquo;s party secretary, Bo Xilai, that some of his own family members were being investigated for corruption. Mr Bo himself, now demoted, has conducted a high-decibel campaign against corruption, resulting in several executions. He is a &ldquo;princeling&rdquo;, the son of one of China&rsquo;s revolutionary heroes and his Western-style open courtship of public opinion was considered distasteful by the technocratic, low-key current leadership.

Changing China 

At a recent conference organised by the group, Financial Technologies Chairman Jignesh Shah had taken a special liking to the famous dialogue from a Vidya Balan movie. In speech after speech, he improvised on the dialogue. First in an evening session, he said for business, there are three important ingredients. They are enterprise, enterprise and enterprise. Then in another session on the financial markets, he said markets run because of three important things &mdash; liquidity, liquidity and liquidity.

Finance gets filmy

Since Indians are die-hard cricket fans, marketing managers of all hues see a tie up with cricketing stars as a sure formula to sell their products. Now South African Tourism is being similarly inspired. To attract Indian tourists, it has signed on former Test player and fielding coach of Indian Premier League team Mumbai Indians Jonty Rhodes to explore wildlife and adventure sports in South Africa for seven days and write a travel diary. Jonty was arguably the best fielder of his time and also a popular figure at home and overseas, so the tourism board has probably made the right catch.

Rhodes bats for tourism

Quoting telltale figures, T N Ninan exposed the hypocrisy of opposition parties in shedding crocodile tears on the &ldquo;insensitivity&rdquo; of the government in defining poverty (&ldquo;Parliamentary chutzpah,&rdquo; March 24). Essentially, by now, it has become an established strategy of all political parties to focus on trivialities surrounding a grave issue instead of dealing with the issue itself. Thus, without crying hoarse on deciding &ldquo;who is poor&rdquo;, politicians could have recognised that even by the government-given definition, there are 354 million poor in India who earn just about Rs 30 a day and then done some intellectual analysis to identify the causes of such indigence to suggest course correction.

Letters: Where there's no will

This refers to Jyoti Malhotra&rsquo;s column &ldquo;In Sri Lanka reversal, India goes with us&rdquo; (Mappings, March 23). It must not be forgotten that the war on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and its supremo Prabhakaran &ndash; who was responsible for killing many moderate Tamils leaders &ndash; was called on to establish peace in the island country and rehabilitate millions of innocent Tamils. Could this have been possible with Prabhakaran around? Certainly not. Post-war, it is important to take cognisance of the massive task at hand for the Sri Lankan government before passing judgements on it. It is no easy job to provide shelter to millions of war-ravaged Tamilians and it cannot be accomplished in a day or two. The Sri Lankan government rightfully needs time to accommodate all sections of people in housing units.

Letters: Look who's talking

Paul Volcker, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, used to say the only worthwhile financial innovation in last 60 years is the automated teller machine (ATM). Reserve Bank of India&rsquo;s Deputy Governor K C Chakrabarty recently quoted Volcker&rsquo;s famous comment but added in his forthright style, &ldquo;The ATM was the only innovation; others were only speculation.

Speculative innovation

The finance minister has apparently made 170 amendments to the Income Tax Act, 1961 in the latest Budget. A tax consultant called it the revenge of the bureaucrats because this is the last chance they may get to amend the 50-year-old law.

Bureaucrats' last stand

The decision by US President Barack Obama to nominate Jim Yong Kim as the American candidate for the top job at the World Bank came as a surprise. Various names, most of them with a higher profile than the president of Dartmouth College, were being thrown about &mdash; senior White House advisor Larry Summers, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and economist Jeffrey Sachs. Any of these nominations would have been considered business as usual.

Decoding Dr Kim

The rural development ministry recently proposed &ldquo;independent, real-time evaluation&rdquo; of the government&rsquo;s flagship social welfare and development programmes, a suggestion that deserves attention not just for its pros, but also for its cons. It is true that given the explosive growth in social sector spending, effective monitoring and evaluation are ever more important. The constant hum of charges that extra money is being misspent or stolen serves to politically discredit these social sector schemes, and they need proper investigation. Yet, the ministry&rsquo;s proposed mechanism looks less like a method for genuine, independent investigation than a way to increase, even further, government employment opportunities for programme evaluation experts. The ministry has suggested a &ldquo;concurrent evaluation network&rdquo;, to be controlled by another new body, the &ldquo;independent evaluation office&rdquo;, or IEO.

Jobs for evaluators

I have a home loan account with a leading private bank. I have also been provided with an executive who is my point of contact. But she does not respond to my calls; neither does she revert to mails easily.

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