Invitations to post-Budget conferences by industry chambers are usually restricted to the finance minister and key finance ministry bureaucrats. This year, however, the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Ficci) made an exception by inviting former Finance Minister and BJP leader Yashwant Sinha (pictured) to discuss his views on the Budget. How did that come about? Sinha revealed the secret. &ldquo;The other day I was telling Rajiv [Kumar, Ficci secretary general] that chambers believe the wisdom lies only with the ministers of the ruling government. A day after I received an invitation to come here,&rdquo; he said. Sinha&rsquo;s dry sense of humour was also in evidence when he prefaced his views by saying, &ldquo;Fortunately, I&rsquo;m not an economist. Apologies to Rajiv [who is]. So I understand things in a simple way.

Common sense

Business Standard

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.

Banking: Prashant Joshi

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 

The leaked draft report of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), published in several newspapers, may or may not eventually be very different from the final report to be tabled in Parliament next month. But, even in its current version, the draft report has correctly focused attention on the severe errors in the government&rsquo;s coal policy. While it may be logically fallacious to claim vast amounts of loss to the state&rsquo;s exchequer based on the output from blocks that Coal India may not have been planning to exploit anyway, there are other serious questions that should be asked. After all, India&rsquo;s power crisis has gone from bad to worse &mdash; and a large part of the problem is coal shortage. India&rsquo;s annual coal production is about 530 million tonnes; this falls short of requirements by 80 million tonnes, and the shortfall is only growing as power demand rises.

Captive of delays

In the continuing uproar about the recently released poverty statistics, too much attention has focused on the exact definition of who counts as poor. But, as Table 1 shows, that definition is continually tweaked. When the Tendulkar approach &mdash; which moved away from focusing just on whether people were getting enough to eat, to whether they had access to other basic goods and services &mdash; was introduced, the percentage of people classified as under the poverty line jumped.

StatsGuru-26-March-12

Apropos the report &ldquo;Mamta Express runs over rail fare hike&rdquo; (March 23), with the way in which key proposals made by Dinesh Trivedi have been rolled back, it seems that we are never going to have a modern railway system with strong safety and cleanliness standards. Indeed it is frustrating to live in a country with leaders who can only think of their vote bank.

Letters: Modernisation derailed

The information technology industry for long has been the favourite punching bag for US politicians, who have time and again blamed the sector for stealing US jobs. As the US heads for a Presidential election in November, where unemployment is likely to be a key issue, the Indian tech sector is trying to counter the bogey against outsourcing, saying it has created a large number of jobs in the US and paid huge taxes which helped the US economy recover.

Countering the outsourcing bogey

This refers to T N Ninan&rsquo;s column &ldquo;Parliamentary chutzpah&rdquo; (Weekend ruminations, March 25). It seems that our politicians are more interested in arriving at a &ldquo;correct&rdquo; definition of poverty rather than implementing economic programmes that could alleviate it. Executing programmes that will (1) provide a minimum income to below-poverty-line families; (2) give access to healthcare at an affordable cost and; (3) ensure that every child goes to school are the main challenges before our planners. But unfortunately our politicians do not wish to face these challenges head on, preferring instead a mere &ldquo;healthy&rdquo; debate on &ldquo;poverty definitions&rdquo;.

Letters: All talk and no action

Your edit &ldquo;Facts, not outrage&rdquo; (March 22) while making the perfectly valid point that the past five to ten years have seen &ldquo;the fastest rate of poverty reduction in India&rsquo;s history&rdquo; &ndash; and that this deserves applause and not criticism &ndash; overlooks two points.

Letters: Poor show

The confusion over Kingfisher Airlines is such that everyone, including Civil Aviation Secretary Naseem Zaidi, tries to avoid answering any questions on its fate. At an Airports Authority of India function recently, when Zaidi was asked what the government was planning to do about the indebted airline, he chose to narrate a story instead. A relative from the US, he said tongue strictly in cheek, had recently gone for a morning walk in Lodhi Gardens in central Delhi, and told him he had spotted Kingfisher birds there. The objective was to suggest that the airline, like the bird, was still visible and that was the extent of his knowledge. Zaidi might not know that the species in Lodhi Gardens is quite different from the one depicted on the airline&rsquo;s logo.

A bird in hand?

This refers to Ajit Balakrishnan&rsquo;s article &ldquo;Core competence and other tales&rdquo; (February 23). There have been many studies on conglomerates in India. In the industrial policy of the seventies, the &ldquo;big houses&rdquo; were allowed to invest in some critical areas under the joint sector. On this, H K Paranjpe, member of the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Commission committee, had said there are businessmen with a trading attitude who concentrate on short gestation projects, diversifying into various businesses. A capitalist would have the long-term viewpoint to invest in long gestation projects and would have the commitment to develop that industry.

Letters: More to management

The porngate scandal in the Karnataka Assembly recently has put the fear of the cellphone in the hearts of all MLAs. They even refuse to check their phones for text messages, just in case they are caught on camera and accused of doing something nefarious by the TV channels. These days, as a result, they keep their cellphones out of the sight.

Phone phobia

Several Members of Parliament and government officials &mdash; former Railway Minister Dinesh Trivedi included &mdash; have bought land to build holiday cottages around Nainital. The hill station has a direct train, Kathgodam Express, from New Delhi. But, this is not fully air-conditioned. The former railway minister had proposed running a Rajdhani Express-like fast train &mdash;Duronto Express &mdash; between Delhi and Kathgodam. Unfortunately, an unfeeling and unsympathetic Railway Borad shot the proposal down.

Connecting points

The Prime Minister&rsquo;s Office (PMO) may have sought clarity on a Rs 57-crore project of Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) S Y Quraishi to establish the India International Institute of Democracy and Election Management (IIDEM) at Dwarka in New Delhi. But Union Budget 2012-13 has a budgetary provision for the same. Around Rs 29.19 crore has been allotted for its construction, the land for which was purchased from the Delhi Development Authority in FY12, the Budget says.

Who gets the top job?

The fiery defender of the aam admi and scourge of reformists, Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee, had a good week. She got rid of her nominee as railway minister, Dinesh Trivedi, and replaced him with someone whom the Congress wished to avoid having in the Union cabinet, Mukul Roy.

Realist and populist 

Business Standard lists key decisions these new chief ministers took during their first week in office.

Best foot forward

Companies have dived into the summer of 2012. Last year, a cool summer had taken its toll on sales of products dependent on the hot season. Beverage makers, cola companies, ice-cream manufacturers and home-appliance majors are hoping this year the heat will really be on, making consumers reach for their products.

Here comes the Summer

The world today achieved the Millennium Development Goal of reducing the number of people without access to safe drinking water by half.

Thirst quenched, but miles to go

On January 7, 2009, Ramalinga Raju of Satyam Computers confessed in a letter to the Bombay Stock Exchange that he had been overstating (that is, fudging) his company&rsquo;s profits for six years. Four days later, the government appointed a caretaker board to find a buyer. Four months later, the company was owned by Tech Mahindra, the highest bidder, and the Satyam crisis was over. Compare this with Kingfisher Airlines&rsquo; crisis, even though many would argue that a comparison between the two cases is not entirely apt. In November last year, the airline announced that flights would be curtailed owing to &ldquo;aircraft reconfiguration&rdquo;; two months later the excuse was changed to &ldquo;bird hits&rdquo;. Meanwhile, Kingfisher&rsquo;s dues to government oil companies stood at Rs 600 crore.

The Air India effect

Replying on Thursday to the debate on the Railway Budget in the Lok Sabha, the new railway minister, Mukul Roy, rolled back most of his predecessor&rsquo;s suggested reforms. Dinesh Trivedi had made a start towards repairing the Indian Railways&rsquo; straitened finances, by raising passenger fares for the first time in eight years. In addition, he had recognised the urgent need to make improvements to the Railways&rsquo; safety infrastructure, which could not happen without the financial reform he had in mind. There was structural reform that Mr Trivedi correctly decided was necessary too. Among those were changes in the Railway Board to bring in those responsible for the Railways&rsquo; financial health and its safety aspects, and making a start on taking politics out of fare-setting &mdash; by examining the possibility of an independent authority to regulate tariffs. Such measures, though limited, were nevertheless overdue.

Business Standard

Business Standard

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