The mid-1990s saw Indian firms explore global markets to sell the goods and services they produced. Then, it wasn&rsquo;t an easy task given that India still had to prove its ability in terms of delivering on quality apart from being cost-competitive. Firms from sectors like software, jewellery, pharmaceuticals, leather, agro, etc were seen treading this path. A lot has changed since then with corporate India taking up new challenges with each passing day.

Growing global footprint

Business Standard

Even as the leadership of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) believes that the Union government must not bail out Kingfisher Airlines and publicly denies any links with Chairman Vijay Mallya, sources close to former Karnataka Chief Minister B S Yeddyurappa say the party members in the Karnataka Assembly had voted in favour of Mallya for his Rajya Sabha nomination. People close to Yeddyurappa claim that BJP President Nitin Gadkari had asked the former chief minister to convey the decision of the party that BJP members in Karnataka should vote in favour of Mallya.

Soaring support

The National Rural Health Mission scam has seen many ministers in the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister&rsquo;s Office come under the Lokayukta scanner. They have been asked to quit not just the office, but the Bahujan Samaj Party, as well. With three chief medical officers (CMOs) dead in the course of the investigation, the situation has reached a point where senior government officials are not ready to take the responsibility of becoming CMOs in the government. One of the doctors in a government hospital wrote to the health minister that he was suffering from major health problems and his family was also not keeping well, after he came to know that he was selected to become CMO.

Sick of excuses!

The Uttar Pradesh poll results may not be out. But for many in the Congress, especially those close to Rahul Gandhi who steered the election campaign in the state, the battle is already won. Union Minister of Rural Development Jairam Ramesh, known to be close to Gandhi, while releasing the new guidelines for the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme was asked to comment on the way the scheme was run by Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati. &ldquo;Former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh&rdquo; &mdash; was the prompt response from the minister. A few minutes later, when he was asked another question on the &ldquo;former&rdquo; chief minister, he shot back in a mood to wisecrack: &ldquo;Former or farmer?&rdquo; Whether it was meant to be derogatory for Mayawati, he did not wait to explain. However, Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar, who has accused NREGS of creating a labour shortage, is unlikely to appreciate such a use of the word &lsquo;farmer&rsquo;.

Former or farmer?

&ldquo;Investors are expecting the Budget to reform policies; upstream government oil companies are seeking transparent subsidy-sharing structure, refining and marketing companies want to pass on some more cost to transport and domestic fuel consumers, and upstream companies are looking for a directional domestic gas pricing policy.

Expert speak: Deepak Mahurkar

&ldquo;Our expectations include service tax exemption in oil &amp; gas exploration, petro products being brought under GST, and natural gas/naphtha &amp; LNG becoming declared goods under the CST Act. We also hope PDS kerosene and domestic LPG to be included under Cenvat Credit Rules. The 80-IB benefit should continue and there should be a level playing field in transportation fuel retail.

Industry speak: LK Gupta

&ldquo;The oil &amp; gas sector is critical to India&rsquo;s energy security and the financial impact it has on the country&rsquo;s import bill. The government needs to include oil &amp; gas exploration under the definition of infrastructure to attract large-scale investments required in the sector. There is also a compelling need to bring petroleum products under the ambit of GST.

Chamber speak: Vikram Mehta

I applied for two tax-free bond issues. However, the allotment was not satisfactory.

Investing: Rishi Nathany

Between weighty decisions about which Rabindra Sangeet is most suitable to be played on Republic Day and whether West Bengal should have black-and-yellow or sky blue cabs, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has taken another one: she is promoting a rock band in which she will also sing. Comprising three journalists, the rock band is yet to be christened but what is certain is that Banerjee has a lead vocalist role. She may rope in the lead singer of Bhoomi, &ldquo;the good-looking, ponytailed 50-plus Soumitra Ray, who has been Mamata's lieutenant for more than three decades now&rdquo;. Ray's mother was one of Banerjee mentors in West Bengal politics.

Mamata rocks

The Uttar Pradesh election results may not be out but for many in the Congress, especially those close to Rahul Gandhi, who steered the election campaign there, the battle is already won. Union Minister Jairam Ramesh is one of such loyalists. Releasing the new guidelines under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), he was asked about his criticism of the way the scheme was run by Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati. &ldquo;Former chief minister of UP,'' he countered. Whether her successor will be a Congress politician is, of course, quite another question.

Ins and outs

Despite the pressures of elections in five states and a hectic schedule before the Budget session, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee took some time out to present Presidential Awards to the officers of Customs and Central Excise. Given that there were 35 awardees, it was inevitable that the enthusiasm of the audience faded as the event progressed. Then, as the name of the penultimate award-winner was announced, the audience suddenly perked up and applauded long and loudly. That&rsquo;s because the award was not for a revenue officer, but for a driver with the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence, who won the award for his exemplary service.

Driven to win

Apropos the editorial &ldquo;Guessing the monsoon&rdquo; (February 23), it is surprising that though the Indian government launched the Megha-Tropiques satellite in October 2011 with French collaboration to study monsoon patterns, the current supercomputing resources are inadequate for long-term predictions. In the absence of technological upgrades restricting all-India forecasts, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) in collaboration with the agriculture ministry must identify the most vulnerable agrarian locations and produce localised models so that timely preventive steps could be taken. The editorial also highlights that the IMD model lags global modelling systems by two or three months and reducing this gap should be an imperative for better planning.

Letters: Chasing the monsoon

Apropos the editorial &ldquo;Guessing the monsoon&rdquo;, despite an early launch of irrigation projects soon after Independence, India&rsquo;s dependence on monsoon hasn&rsquo;t come down significantly. Most large dam projects have stretched much beyond their budgetary and time projections. Besides, there is the problem of rehabilitating project-affected people. Given the ever-increasing need for foodgrain, pulses and vegetables, it is probably time the government made single-point agenda of irrigation just as the US government did with road building.

Letters: Make irrigation the focus

Some of the concerns raised in the editorial titled &ldquo;Green cover-up&rdquo; (February 15) merit attention including the statement that &ldquo;Equally baffling is the bid to hold chopping of eucalyptus trees responsible for declining forest cover in some states&rdquo;. ITC Limited has established India&rsquo;s largest and most eco-friendly pulp, paper and paperboard mill in the Khammam district of Andhra Pradesh; the Indian State of Forest Report&rsquo;s alleged contention that harvesting eucalyptus trees for agroforestry in the Khammam district has led to the loss of forest cover is wrong and misleading. ITC has facilitated cultivation of 207-square kilometre (sq km) eucalyptus plantations under its Farm and Social Forestry programmes. In addition, it has facilitated subabul plantations covering 122 sq km. India&rsquo;s eucalyptus harvest in 2011 was a meagre 18.5 sq km, less than 10 per cent of the company-facilitated plantations.

Letters: Growing green

Many sensible recommendations have been made by the high-level safety review committee set up recently in the wake of several accidents on Indian Railways. The report says that if the committee were to make only one recommendation, it would be to monitor and implement what is already known &mdash; but has been languishing at various stages of consideration or execution.

Tracks to safety

The manner in which a leading scientist recently obtained vital information on global warming from the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank, may seem incredible to someone unaware about the climate change wars. What started as an arcane policy debate has long since degenerated into a series of acrimonious ideological battles. The Heartland Institute is among what have come to be called climate-change deniers, those who wage political battles against the overwhelming scientific evidence for human-made global warming. It is a prominent campaigner against green legislation. On the other side is the well-known hydroclimatologist Peter Gleick, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and a MacArthur &ldquo;Genius&rdquo; Fellow.

Deniers polarise 

There are many things that are significant about the report of the task force studying a unified payment infrastructure that uses the Unique ID, or Aadhaar, but perhaps the most notable is its timing. It has been presented to Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee just as the Budget season is at its height. This is indicative of the direction in which Mr Mukherjee must go in order to control the United Progressive Alliance&rsquo;s (UPA&rsquo;s) politically sensitive but fiscally damaging welfare spending. Cost savings must come from somewhere, and improvements in the efficiency of transfers are the best long-term method to save costs. The report, which was drafted by a committee headed by Nandan Nilekani, chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), was meant to study possible methods to route payments under various government schemes to beneficiaries through direct cash transfers.

Transforming transfers

The new investment policy for urea that has been cleared by an empowered group of ministers has a few welcome features. Its success, though, measured in terms of enticing fresh resources to the sector, will depend critically on three things: the availability of natural gas, a stable fertiliser policy regime, and the overall progress of sector-wide reform. The new policy reportedly seeks to ensure a minimum 12 per cent post-tax return on the capital, which should make prospective investors happy. So should the proposal to fix separate bands of floor and ceiling cost for urea produced by the new plants (greenfield projects), the expansion of existing plants (brownfield projects) and a more efficient calculation of subsidy support, based on the concept of import parity price for gas.

Urea needs decontrol

The frequent changes on the excise duty front in the last few years seem to have puzzled the Prime Minister&rsquo;s Economic Advisory Council (PMEAC). At a recent press conference to announce the review of the economy for 2011-12, a PMEAC member said that before the 2008 crisis both the excise duty and service tax rate were at 12 per cent. The fact, however, is that the standard excise rate has never been at 12 per cent in the last four years.

Taxing the memory

What&rsquo;s the penalty if an outsider is caught inside North Block in these times? No one knows. Entry to the building currently requires a prior appointment communicated to the reception in writing by the officer concerned. One smart journalist decided to use the opportunity to get access to other officers in North Block. But IB plainclothes officers turned out to be smarter. They nabbed him and filed a complaint. Now the finance ministry is wondering what action to take beyond barring future access to North Block &mdash; which is hardly likely to deter any journalist from getting the news.

Entry barriers

&ldquo;In the midst of decelerating economic growth, high inflation and dwindling investments, industry has many expectations from the Union Budget 2012-13. Among other things, industry expects the government to further enhance infrastructure investment, check fiscal deficit, channelise large pool of domestic savings into infrastructure and give policy directions to re-build investors&rsquo; confidence.

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