Now that General V K Singh is on foreign shores for a while, the controversy over whether the commander of the world&rsquo;s second-largest army was born in 1950 or 1951 appears destined for a quiet burial. And now that the Supreme Court has dismissed his petition challenging the government&rsquo;s rejection of his demand for a reconciliation of his birth date, General Singh can be expected to retire in May this year, just as he was supposed to do when he was appointed chief. With that, the uncertainty over his successor has ended, and many believe that, with the Supreme Court having rapped both the government and the general on their knuckles &ndash; indicating that the dispute should never have been brought before it in the first place &ndash; the odds are even.

General in a labyrinth

Business Standard

Guess what Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti and Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos have in common? For one, all three are economists and, for another, all three head coalition governments. Papademos and Singh have another point of similarity: both were governors of their respective central banks &mdash; Singh headed the Reserve Bank of India between 1982 and 1985 and Papademos was Governor of the Bank of Greece from 1994 to 2002. The major point of difference, of course, is that Monti and Papademos, both of whom took charge in November last year, head countries that are neck-deep in financial and economic crises. Singh doesn't have to face that problem as prime minister &mdash; he addressed that particular crisis as finance minister almost 21 years ago.

Same difference

Every year, the Mughal Gardens in Rashtrapati Bhavan are thrown open for the general public to appreciate the lavishly laid out lawns with their stunning seasonal blooms. But this year, there's a small difference: the gardens will be closed on February 15, according to a terse press release that does not ascribe a reason. Our enquiries reveal that a meeting of state governors has been scheduled on that day to discuss agriculture and related issues. If that sounds odd (why should state governors and the country's president spend a whole day discussing agricultural issues?), our sources clarify that the meeting has been called as part of a follow-up of the president's initiative to involve state governors in boosting farm production in the country. Agriculture is a significant issue but it is worth wondering whether such a meeting will yield meaningful results &mdash; and, therefore, whether it's worth closing the gardens for it.

Out of bounds?

Will ATF imports help cut airline losses?

On November 14, 2011, I handed over an outstation cheque (account payee) to my bank for collection via pay-in slip. The bank sent the cheque for realisation through Speed Post. Till date, the cheque has not been credited. The bank says the cheque was lost in transit. A complaint filed with Speed Post hasn't helped. I have lodged a complaint with the bank under the Right to Inform-ation Act (RTI), asking for credit of the principal and interest accrued. It hasn't fetched any reply.

Banking: Prashant Joshi

The army chief has lost the battle against the government after the Supreme Court categorically discarded his petition in the age dispute. The chief&rsquo;s decision to take the government to court over his age turned out to be a huge miscalculation. Especially if we consider the court&rsquo;s view that the chief should have taken measures to get his age corrected much earlier in his career and not when his retirement was approaching. The court explicitly stated that it did not in the least doubt the army chief&rsquo;s honour and integrity. It also applauded his 38 years of service to the nation and said it wanted him to complete his term and lead as the chief of the 1,300,000-strong Indian army.

Letters: ...but will it be enough?

Apropos the report &ldquo;The curious case of coal crisis&rdquo; (February13), it is shocking to know that the private sector is sitting on 49 billion tonnes of coal reserves in 208 captive blocks and producing only 37 million tonnes a year, less than six per cent of the potential production capacity. A similar story will emerge if we were to take stock of the unutilised land with the private sector.

Letters: Coal block

The Supreme Court&rsquo;s judgement upholding the defence ministry&rsquo;s decision on General V K Singh&rsquo;s official date of birth has at last put the long-drawn controversy to rest. Since May 10, 1950, was recognised as the chief&rsquo;s date of birth all along his career, making changes now, at the fag end of his career, would have created a multiplicity of problems like changing the date of promotion, re-fixing his pay at different dates, calculating his revised pay and allowances at different stages and so on. In a pertinent observation, the Supreme Court underlined that the government did not harass the chief on this issue and that it had complete confidence in his efficiency and integrity. Given this, it is hoped that the chief will accept the verdict honourably and not precipitate the matter by seeking premature retirement.

Letters: A just verdict

Some sector regulators think their industries should be regulated with a light touch, but Insurance Regulatory Authority (Irda) Chairman J Hari Narayan has strong views on the subject. On the sidelines of an event organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry in Hyderabad, a journalist told Narayan that insurers were not comfortable with Irda&rsquo;s micromanagement. &ldquo;What they don&rsquo;t like, they call micromanagement,&rdquo; the Irda chief retorted adding, &ldquo;basically they suggest that we should have less and less regulation. But whether that less and less regulation leads to better and better performance remains to be seen. I am quite sceptical about that&rdquo;.

Lesser mortals in insurance

When some of India&rsquo;s top economists gathered at a book launch in Delhi recently, they made the most of the opportunity to take a dig at politicians. Bimal Jalan sparked the debate by saying there is an incentive to join politics and no one would like to be a politician if that incentive were reversed. Nitin Desai said the finance ministry should call its economists political scientists because they are always busy writing papers on how to achieve good policies with bad politics, and Deepak Nayyar added that behind every successful politician there are the ideas of some defunct economists.

Political economists

It&rsquo;s no secret that the government is cagey about giving out data. But here&rsquo;s a case of the government turning chary about revealing information it had been putting in the public domain for several years. Till recently, the website of the Foreign Investment Promotion Board, the finance ministry wing that considers foreign direct investment proposals, uploaded the status of applications every week. Then suddenly, the data didn&rsquo;t show up for over a month. Asked about this omission, one official said there was nothing like a weekly update, another said he had no clue about it and several others insisted that no such data could be shared with the media. A more plausible cause, as revealed by an insider, was that the key official concerned was on leave so no decision could be taken on uploading the data. Finally, when the administration woke up to the situation, data spanning several weeks was uploaded on the site in a bunch.

Out of site, out of mind

There was a time, sometime in December, when it was impossible to walk down the street in an Indian metropolis without hearing a snatch from &lsquo;Kolaveri&rsquo;. The song, recorded by a group of Tamil actors and singers, has now been watched over 42 million times on the internet website YouTube; Sony Music, which owns the copyright, has seen a comparable number of downloads. Its amateurish, relaxed feel served to enhance its popularity. The group&rsquo;s leader, the actor-singer Dhanush &mdash; born Venkatesh Prabhu Kasthuri Raja &mdash; pointed out in the course of a seminar on viral marketing at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad last week, that the film with which it is associated &mdash; 3 &mdash; received an enormous amount of publicity as a result. The film will now be released not just in Tamil, but also in Telugu and Hindi; and instead of just 400 prints, as originally planned, over 1,000 will be screened. When viral marketing works, it works spectacularly.

The secret of ad energy  

On Monday, Commerce Minister Anand Sharma walked across the Wagah land border between India and Pakistan on his way to attend the closing ceremony of the extremely popular &ldquo;India Show&rdquo;, a trade fair organised to highlight Indian products in Lahore. The agenda for his visit is to move forward on liberalising trade between the two neighbours, following along from negotiations in Islamabad last year. The &ldquo;normalisation&rdquo; of trade has been repeatedly touted by New Delhi as a possible game-changer in bilateral relations. Yet it does not appear that Mr Sharma&rsquo;s visit will pay the dividends that would have been possible had India&rsquo;s bureaucracy capitalised on the gains made last year. Trade relations seem to still be held hostage to a mindset that believes that the only successful outcome is if the other side appears to have given more than you have.

Walking across Wagah 

Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee's public statement that he is losing sleep over the government's burgeoning subsidy bill appears to have had some effect. Those in queue for budgetary hand-outs are now scaling back their expectations.

Pranab's wake-up call

It appears that the final conclusion of the proceedings in the case involving the army chief&rsquo;s age is that we have two army chiefs &mdash; one born in 1950 as claimed by the government and one born in 1951 as the chief claims himself.

Letters: The case of two army chiefs

Earlier, it was easy to know the value of a coin with a quick look. Now, with the introduction of new coins, it is not so. The following pairs of old and new coins look the same: (a) 50 paise and Rs 1; (b) Rs 1 and Rs 2; and (c) Rs 1 and Rs 5. As a result, every time a citizen wants to hand over change to a bus conductor or a shop he has to see the denomination. If he happens to see the obverse of the coin he has to turn it around to see the reverse that contains the value. It becomes irksome when one has to hand over several coins to buy a ticket in a moving bus while standing. With the use of vending machines and public telephones, it is necessary that the size and shape of coins remain the same, even though the metallic content may be altered to forestall arbitrage. It is a matter involving a billion people in daily transactions.

Letters: The coin confusion

This refers to the report &ldquo;Pranab says losing sleep over rising subsidy bill&rdquo; (February 9). It has taken more than seven years for the United Progressive Alliance&rsquo;s common minimum programme to find expression in the form of an intention to introduce the Food Security Bill. The need to ensure the minimum nutritional needs of the under-privileged is overdue and, in this context, the Food Security Bill is welcome. Only a small section of the urban population can afford the prices of imported processed-food and bottled drinking-water. The well-being of the remaining one billion people is dependent on the food and water available locally.

Letters: Food security and subsidies

Farmer-turned-chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan is known for his philosophical speeches that blend policy highlights, shlokas, and excerpts from the myths. Last week, he took this skill to new heights and ensured that several foreign dignitaries and his own Cabinet colleagues enjoyed a comfortable doze on the dais during an international seminar on cooperatives. In his speech, Chouhan dwelt at length on how society can keep a human happy by ensuring him Tan Ka Sukh (physical health), Man Ka Sukh (mental health), Atma Ka Sukh (spiritual health) and Buddhi Ka Sukh (healthy intelligence). He quoted several shlokas from the Gita and other myths. But he forebore to disclose how he would tackle the burning issue that cooperatives face, especially when almost all the funds in state-owned cooperative banks has been eroded. Commenting on the outcome of the seminar, a senior BJP leader joked, &ldquo;Cooperatives are going to be the new philosophy of the government in the next election.

Philosophical 'overdoze'

As the Supreme Court judgment on February 2 cancelling the issue of 2G licences in 2008 reiterated, auctions are the preferred method of handing over natural resources to the private sector for exploitation. Properly designed and implemented, they are useful methods to discover the true price of the resource being allocated.

Another 2G, in mining? 

Has Brussels pushed Greece too far? No, if the austerity demanded by the &ldquo;troika&rdquo; of the European Commission, European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund is anything to go by in return for a second bailout worth euro 130 billion. Yes, if you sympathise with the strikers and protesters on Syntagma Square outside the Greek Parliament in Athens. Between the two extremes lies the fate of not just a small country but the future of the euro zone. Greece&rsquo;s caretaker national government was told bluntly by euro zone lenders that it needed to do more than the euro 3.3 billion cuts it had brought to the table. While the country&rsquo;s political class is largely behind the cutbacks, the nation remains bitterly divided about the extent to which its welfare state should be pruned.

Oversupply of demands

The rift between the food and agriculture ministries over the Food Security Bill and other issues concerning the food economy is well known but the two ministers still rarely lose the opportunity to undermine each other. This was well in evidence during a recent meeting of state food and agriculture ministers to discuss grain procurement, production and distribution. In his welcome address, Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar took care to mention the name of his ministry&rsquo;s secretary before that of the food ministry&rsquo;s. And Food Minister K V Thomas returned the compliment by naming his ministry&rsquo;s secretary before the agriculture ministry&rsquo;s. Coincidence or protocol? Whatever the reason, a joint press conference called by the two ministers was reduced to an address only by Thomas; Pawar inexplicably failed to find time to attend.

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