This refers to Akash Prakash's article &ldquo;The populism risk&rdquo;(March 9). The author talks about the risks of fiscal imprudence, socialistic bouts in the form of quotas and giveaways, and populism in the form of loan waivers to farmers. It is noteworthy that even when the ruling party (the Congress) enjoyed a comfortable majority in both the Houses, it had adopted populism to win over vote banks, especially in rural areas. In fact, farm loan waivers amounting to more than Rs 65,000 crore just before the last general elections got the Congress back into power with a better majority. Electoral setbacks would only make the Congress even more socialistic and, unfortunately, a strong economic agenda would not help it retain power post-2014. Clearly, there's a lack of economic leadership, even when an economist is heading the Centre.

Letters: Always the populist

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For years, it has been regular practice for school buildings in rural India to double as granaries during harvest time to tide over the chronic shortage of storage facilities with state agencies. Even so, senior officials from the agriculture ministry were surprised when, during a visit to one of the main rice-producing regions, they found two rooms in a primary school building being used to store grain. Their surprise had nothing to do with the use to which the rooms were put but the fact that they were named after Jawaharlal Nehru and Madan Mohan Malviya, who were, no doubt, expected to have been a source of inspiration for the children.

Grains of memory

The edit &ldquo;Sliding further downhill&rdquo; (March 9) and Sunanda K Datta-Ray&rsquo;s column &ldquo;Waiting for the man&rdquo; (March 10) direct the blame for thwarting fiscal and safety reforms in the Railways towards Mamata Banerjee. But should not the onus of this sorry state of affairs be on the prime minister, who is steadily abdicating his responsibility to govern the nation in favour of his coalition partners to save his government and, thus, his chair? Even allowing for the compulsions of coalition politics, there should be a limit, based on the principle of collective responsibility, on the degree of freedom a minister can enjoy in his portfolio.

Letters: Who's to blame?

Apropos the report &ldquo;Akhilesh Yadav to become youngest UP chief minister&rdquo; (March 11), the chief minister-designate certainly created a big impression on voters in Uttar Pradesh in a short time and his efforts deserve praise. He not only tried to cleanse the Samajwadi Party of its goonda image, but also showed maturity by declaring that his party would not touch the statues built during Mayawati&rsquo;s regime. Overall, one found Yadav&rsquo;s style mellower than that of the Nehru-Gandhi family scion Rahul Gandhi, who was constantly in the limelight. One, now, hopes India&rsquo;s youngest chief minister delivers and puts Uttar Pradesh on the path to development.

Letters: UP's young hope

Apropos T N Ninan&rsquo;s column &ldquo;Boo&rsquo;s under-city&rdquo; (March 10), do we really need someone, more so a foreigner, to tell us the story of corruption in our country? Does the government need to be told about this reality to design better policies and programmes? Didn&rsquo;t Rajiv Gandhi famously say only 15 paise out of one rupee of government spending reached the beneficiary? The fact is that corruption has become a way of life and people from all strata of society work around it somehow or the other. One can only hope that movements like Anna Hazare&rsquo;s will stir up our conscience enough to rid ourselves of this scourge.

Letters: Clear and present

This week, the Ministry of Finance and the Reserve Bank of India have some tough decisions to take. StatsGuru collates the headline numbers that lay bare their dilemma.

StatsGuru-12-March-12

Monetary policy is most effective when it is unanticipated, and the Reserve Bank of India&rsquo;s (RBI&rsquo;s) decision to cut the cash reserve ratio, or CRR, for banks by 75 basis points on Friday was indeed unexpected. This is a pleasant change, for the central bank has in recent times chosen to focus on its regular schedule of reviews instead of responding to the needs of the market more spontaneously.

RBI waits for FM

The Supreme Court&rsquo;s startling directive to the Centre to set up a &ldquo;special committee&rdquo; to expedite river interlinking, which the Court declared was in the &ldquo;national interest&rdquo;, has caused the grandiose project to be, once again, closely examined. The idea has been fashionable in fits and starts; it was conceived as far back as the 1970s, and was promoted by the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government after the 2002 drought.

Giant and impractical 

The fact that the Gandhi family's writ runs large in the Congress is well known. Less known is the fact that the party operates through power cliques divided into Sonia and Rahul loyalist camps with little interaction between the two. This was apparent on the day the Uttar Pradesh Assembly results trickled in. Even as the All India Congress Committee official in charge of the media and Sonia loyalist Janardhan Dwivedi tried to tackle the queries of persistent journalists on the party's poor performance, he was completely unaware of Rahul Gandhi&rsquo;s decision to address the media. He found out through the media &mdash; that too, only when television channels flashed it as &ldquo;breaking news.

Divide and rule

A senior MCX official was in good spirits after the company's shares were listed on the stock exchanges at a handsome premium. When a reporter suggested that the issue size was too small and could have been much bigger considering the demand it eventually saw, the official quickly rebutted, saying, &ldquo;The trick is in showing just enough to create interest. If you show more then, mazaa nahi aata (there's no fun).

Small show, big gains

The sudden ban on cotton exports and the subsequent disagreement between the textiles and agriculture ministries have more to do with a lack of communication between Textiles Minister Anand Sharma, whose ministry imposed the ban, and Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar, who has opposed it. As Textiles Secretary Kiran Dhingra explained, Sharma and Pawar could not meet to discuss this sensitive topic because both were out of the country in turns. It turns out that Sharma did try to inform Pawar of the decision. Through what means? In this era of email, mobile phones and text messaging Sharma chose to leave a handwritten note on the decision for Pawar before he started his overseas tour. So Pawar only got to see the note after he returned from his trip by which time the decision was fait accompli. It is worth wondering why two senior Cabinet ministers in the United Progressive Alliance cannot interact and share their views by other, faster means.

Written down method

Official tour reports from the fields are usually pretty drab documents that tend to get buried deep inside government offices. This year, however, the agriculture ministry has decided not to let the light of such official reports be hidden under a bushel. So the ministry has produced a neatly compiled book of the tour reports of the last year by its 15-odd officials titled &ldquo;Vignettes of Indian Agriculture&rdquo;. Apart from being a repository of ground-level reports, the book also contains suggestions to problems as seen by officers on the scene and how good work done in some places replicated nationwide. It is uncertain how far policy makers will refer to this document, but as an example of transparent bureaucracy it has certainly set a precedent.

Breaking new ground

I couldn&rsquo;t agree more with Debashis Basu&rsquo;s assertion that gold investments are not exactly risk-free at current levels (&ldquo;Pushing gold, without knowing the risks,&rdquo; March 5). Apart from dollar weakness and demand from India and China, another reason for global gold demand is the fact that fiat currencies are held in poor light vis-&agrave;-vis gold. This perception got a boost when central banks around the world, particularly in emerging economies, started adding gold to their forex reserves.

Letters: In gold we trust?

While Congress scion Rahul Gandhi attempted to conquer Uttar Pradesh with his &lsquo;man at work&rsquo; image &mdash; sporting a stubble and rolling up his sleeves as he seemed to tear to shreds the Samajwadi Party (SP) manifesto; the SP&rsquo;s young leader Akhilesh Yadav was a complete foil. The young Yadav &mdash; with his boy-next-door stance, a calm and gentleman-like dignified demeanour &mdash; gained much appreciation from everyone. In fact, his manners forced people to rethink the popular notion of the SP as a &ldquo;a party for goons&rdquo;. Ironically, despite the aggressive stance, all Rahul Gandhi could deliver in the state was six more seats than 2007, while the Akhilesh-led SP campaign bagged a record 224 seats.

Sporting the right look?

On the morning of March 6, when initial Uttar Pradesh election results&rsquo; trends were being shown on news channels, the media team of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) jumped with joy to see the party leading in as many as 71 seats &mdash; on a par with the Samajwadi Party. The BJP&rsquo;s spokespersons started announcing that the party could form the government in Uttar Pradesh on its own. However, as the day passed and it became clear that the BJP might not even cross 50 seats in the state, Member of Parliament and son of Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Prem Kumar Dhumal, Anurag Thakur, was relieved that he did not claim the BJP would form the government when he was live on television. He said he realised there was probably something wrong.

Too early to say

World Bank President Robert Zoellick will be in India later this month on a farewell tour and he will, of course, be meeting all the appropriate people. But an unexpected stop on his itinerary is Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh, who will also host a reception for Zoellick. Apparently, Ramesh and Zoellick struck a rapport after the World Bank agreed to support several crucial rural development programmes. They are now good friends. No, this does not mean Ramesh aspires to be Zoellick&rsquo;s successor.

Strong bond of friendship

The new iPad&rsquo;s Retina display delivers four times the number of pixels of iPad 2, making web pages, text, images and video look incredibly sharp and realistic.

New iPad: A delectable Apple dish

My wife and I both work for Indian Bank and jointly own a flat in Kochi. We took a loan to buy the flat in my wife&rsquo;s name. I had guaranteed the loan. Repayment of the loan is made by both of us, out of our respective savings accounts. Will you please clarify if my contribution towards this qualifies for deduction under Section 80C? The loan availed by my wife, a clerk in the bank, earns simple interest repayable only after liquidation of the principle.

Taxation: Homi Mistry

The government&rsquo;s recent announcement on an action plan to ensure the supply of adequate amounts of coal for new power projects with an estimated capacity of more than 50,000 mw is a significant step, though how far it will help resolve the electricity sector&rsquo;s problems is a moot point. The action plan, approved by a committee of secretaries with none else than the prime minister&rsquo;s principal secretary at its head, stipulates that Coal India Limited will sign fuel supply agreements with power producing companies that will commission projects before March 2015 and for which they have entered into long-term power-purchase agreements with distribution entities. And for power plants that have been commissioned by December 2011, the fuel supply agreement will have to be signed before the end of the current financial year. If Coal India fails to meet its commitment under the fuel supply agreeement, it will have to arrange for the supply of coal through imports.

Fix the tariff

Union Railway Minister Dinesh Trivedi has, by both what he has done and by what he has chosen not to do, worsened the immediate future of the organisation whose well-being has been entrusted to him. In trying to prepare the groundwork for presenting a respectable budget for 2012-13, he has raised freight rates for major items by between 20 and 25 per cent. This is not all. He has also clearly indicated that passenger fares will not be raised for the time being. The need to do the latter has been virtually universally voiced, the latest by the parliamentary consultative committee for the railways. What is good for the Indian Railways (IR), currently in very poor financial and physical shape, is as well-known as it is simple: go easy on freight rates which make money, and raise passenger fares which do not &mdash; and have not been touched for years.

Sliding further downhill

Life has come full circle for Kripashankar Singh, the former Congress Mumbai unit chief, who has been facing charges of amassing wealth disproportionate to his income. Literally. An FIR was lodged against him at the Nirmal Nagar police station in Bandra East. Ironically, this was the same station for which he laid the foundation stone as the minister of state for home in the 2004 Maharastra Cabinet.

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