If nothing else, Aditya Thackeray as the head of the newly minted Yuva Sena must be applauded for his consistency in upholding the tradition of cultural intolerance that masquerades as the ideology of the mother party, the Shiv Sena. His campaign to excise Rohinton Mistry&rsquo;s novel Such a Long Journey from Bombay University&rsquo;s curriculum, for containing what he considers remarks derogatory to his grandfather and father&rsquo;s party, probably helped him pass a loyalty test that the eldest Mr Thackeray can no longer take for granted from his family. Never mind if he hasn&rsquo;t actually read the book he has deemed offensive. Much criticism has been heaped on the eagerness of the vice-chancellor of Bombay University &mdash; a nominally autonomous institution &mdash; for the alacrity with which he acceded to one pupil&rsquo;s demand, as conveyed by the Sena&rsquo;s students&rsquo; wing.

Play Mistry for me

Business Standard

The Tata group has provoked some positive shock and awe with its $50 million (Rs 225 crore) donation to Harvard Business School (HBS), the biggest international gift in the 102-year-old institution&rsquo;s history. After the collective sense of shame in the run-up to the Commonwealth Games, the news certainly generated a twinge of patriotic satisfaction: a respected Indian corporate brand has attracted worldwide attention for the right reasons. The spin-offs from this donation in building the Tata brand will, of course, be very real and long-term. An academic-cum-residential building on the HBS campus for executive education programmes, to be called Tata House, will ensure sustained brand recall, embedded within the best-known brand in the business education industry worldwide. In one stroke, this donation puts Tata on a par with global philanthropists such as Rockefeller, Buffet and Gates, even if they operate on a different scale.

CSR goes 'glocal'

First it was Vedanta&rsquo;s bauxite mining project at Niyamgiri; then it was Sterlite&rsquo;s (a part of Vedanta) copper smelter at Tuticorin; now it is Posco&rsquo;s steel project in Orissa. All of them had got environmental clearances in the past, and all of them now face the axe. Some of them have run the gauntlet of environmental controversy for years. Now, the environment minister has ordered a review of 49 mining leases given in Maharashtra&rsquo;s Sindhudurg district. He is also known to have stopped some power station-linked coal mining projects that were cleared earlier, for the perfectly good reason that they violate tiger reserves or because they fall in &ldquo;no-go&rdquo; areas of thick jungle. For all one knows, more project reviews could be in the pipeline.

Environmental choices

Economic data coming out of China on Thursday would partly explain why China&rsquo;s macroeconomic authorities chose to surprise, many said &ldquo;spook&rdquo;, global markets with a 25-basis point rate hike on Tuesday. Many analysts believe that China may report better-than-expected growth numbers and higher-than-expected inflation numbers. With an intent to cool down a potentially overheating economy, China&rsquo;s policy-makers may have taken this surprise decision.

Heat from cooling China

Several committees have gone into issues concerning the fertiliser sector ever since the industry producing this vital farm input slipped into doldrums in the early 1990s. However, their reports have largely been treated with disregard. It would be a pity if the latest report on reforms in the fertiliser sector, submitted to the cabinet secretary by the committee headed by former Agriculture Secretary T Nanda Kumar, also meets the same fate.

Fertiliser reforms

India&rsquo;s march towards an integrated Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime appears to have considerably slowed down since the Union government&rsquo;s failed attempt to introduce in Parliament a Constitution amendment Bill needed to bring about the proposed reform in indirect taxes across the country.

GST on slow track

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is set to visit Tokyo, Hanoi and Kuala Lumpur next week, and Seoul next month. While he would be attending the India-Asean and G20 summits in Hanoi and Seoul, respectively, there would also be bilateral engagements. He visits Kuala Lumpur for the second time as prime minister, but for his first bilateral summit. This would be his fourth visit to Tokyo but a potentially important one if India and Japan sign their bilateral free trade agreement and if an understanding is reached on the parameters for cooperation in the field of civil nuclear energy development. Taken together, these four visits over the next few weeks could constitute a new phase in India&rsquo;s &ldquo;Look-East Policy&rdquo;, launched less than two decades ago by Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao. India&rsquo;s engagement of Asia to its east gained momentum only with the end of the Cold War.

Manmohan travels East

This newspaper has not often taken political sides. Indeed, Indian journalism has not had the western tradition of the media declaring its political preferences. In the state of Bihar, however, which has now entered a month-long election period, the choice is clear and preferences should be stated. Bihar&rsquo;s voters have to choose between five more years of a government led by Nitish Kumar, or five years or less of confusion created by an uncertain and split verdict, or five years of some nameless politician serving his tenure in Patna at Delhi&rsquo;s beck and call.

Bihar needs Nitish Kumar

The unexpectedly good response to the initial public offer (IPO) from Coal India, with a 15 times subscription, has naturally enthused the market and warmed the cockles of the government&rsquo;s fiscal managers, who hoped to raise Rs 15,000 crore from this one IPO. It is now clear that after the 3G auction and Coal India proceeds, and following the revival of economic growth with forecasts in the range of 8-9 per cent, the Union finance minister finds himself comfortably placed in meeting his fiscal deficit targets. Indeed, it would be a good idea for the finance minister to announce, during his mid-year review of the economy, a more conservative target for fiscal correction than was earlier planned. This is the year for fiscal correction. With Bihar elections out of the way this month, and no major elections scheduled until mid-2011, the next six months offer a good time for fiscal stabilisation.

Coal can fuel growth

Soon after taking charge of the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, its minister, Kamal Nath, had announced that his target was to build 20 km of highways every day. Given the glacial pace of road-building in the previous five years (the first term of the UPA government between 2004 and 2009 saw an average construction pace of 4 km a day), the new target was ambitious. That it was unrealistic and unachievable is now beyond dispute. The first evidence of that came when almost without anyone noticing it, the ministry scaled down last year&rsquo;s target to 3,166 km or about 9 km a day. Actual performance last year was worse. Highways construction during 2009-10 was estimated at 2,672 km or about 7 km a day. This may be an improvement over the performance in the previous five years, but there was no solace in the figures for the first six months of 2010-11 when the road-building pace almost halved to 3.7 km a day.

On a slippery road

The controversy into which the microfinance sector has recently been plunged has reportedly prompted the Union government to speed up its proposed legislation for the sector so that disparate action by individual states does not stymie its growth. This is just as well because it will be a tragedy if, in seeking to rein in the culpable, regulation ends up throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Needed, a common code

Gyeongju, in South Korea, is imbued with history and is home to the famous tombs of the kings of the Kingdom of Silla. It was not, therefore, entirely out of place that history was made at Gyeongju this week when the finance ministers and central bank governors of the G20 countries issued a communiqu&eacute; calling for important changes in the shareholding and governance structure of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

History at Gyeongju

On paper, the government&rsquo;s plan to create an independent Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) in place of the government-controlled Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) looks unexceptionable. An industry that is now dominated by private airline companies certainly requires a regulator that is equidistant from government, itself owner of the biggest airline operator, and industry. But there are compelling reasons to suspect that the CAA will be DGCA by an other name. One reason lies in India&rsquo;s recent regulatory history. To start with, the government has not yet been able to fully establish the autonomy of independent regulators by opting to man most of them with retired civil servants, mostly from the Indian Administrative Service. It could be argued that former bureaucrats are uniquely qualified to head regulatory bodies since they are well-versed in the mechanics of policy-making.

Regulating the regulator

While software industry leaders are claiming that the economic environment for them continues to be challenging, the numbers indicate a more positive state of affairs and a possible return to business as usual. The dark year of 2009-10 is behind them. This is particularly so for the top two. Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has steadily improved top line growth for the third successive quarter now and chalked up an impressive 24.9 per cent growth year-on-year for the September quarter. Same is the case with Infosys Technologies, which has recorded a 24.4 per cent growth. Both have in the process gone back to the rate of growth they had achieved in the fourth quarter of 2008-09, that is six quarters ago. On the margin front the story is varied but instructive. Even through the slowdown, TCS had been improving its margins and its net margin now stands at an impressive 23.3 per cent, which is under 2 percentage points behind that of the margin leader Infosys.

In firm recovery mode

To become a textbook inflation targeting central bank, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has miles to go before it can sleep. Printing at 8.6 per cent for September, wholesale price inflation remains way above the central bank&rsquo;s target of 5.5 per cent. Food price inflation remains stubbornly high and its very persistence seems to suggest that it can no longer be dismissed as a supply-side problem. Rising rural demand seems to be playing a role in food inflation, particularly in shoring up the price of things like milk, fish, fruits and vegetables. (These are items that would typically see a rising share as the rural consumer&rsquo;s consumption basket gets &ldquo;gentrified&rdquo;). The bottom line is that the central bank needs to worry about food prices as well and cannot just lob the ball across to the supply-manager&rsquo;s court. Thus, from a purist&rsquo;s perspective, more tightening in the RBI&rsquo;s monetary policy review on November 2 would be imperative.

Time to press pause

New Delhi and Tokyo need a daily direct flight between the two Capitals as a first step towards realising the grandiose &ldquo;Vision for India-Japan Strategic and Global Partnership in the Next Decade&rdquo;! Jointly adopted by the two governments on the occasion of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh&rsquo;s visit to Japan, the vision statement is a comprehensive and wide-ranging statement of shared interests and shared values. If this vision statement does indeed shape the course of the bilateral relationship, then Japan will emerge as India&rsquo;s most important partner country in Asia. However, for this wide-ranging vision to become reality, both countries must do more with each other and together than has been on offer and in evidence in the past decade when a lot of nice words have been uttered but very little action has been forthcoming on the ground.

More words from Japan

There is infinite wisdom in old sayings. Put your money where your mouth is, is one such useful advice for all politicians who habitually put their mouth where money is. The idea of a right to food in one of the hungriest nations is good. However, as we have said before with respect to other such &ldquo;rights&rdquo; handed down in India, any legal binding on government must be matched by its capacity to deliver. Without that capacity, rights and laws remain on paper, generate legal activism and, worse, public cynicism. Hence, to carry conviction about the proposed food security legislation, prepared by the National Advisory Council, state governments have to put in place a public distribution system (PDS) that can deliver food to those who need it and seek it. India&rsquo;s PDS remains patchy and geographically skewed &mdash; more prevalent where it is less needed and virtually absent where it is most needed.

Mouth and money

Nobody in her right senses can disagree with the Reserve Bank of India&rsquo;s (RBI&rsquo;s) advice that the government should consider setting up a mechanism to monitor the end-use of the money brought into the country by way of foreign investment in the hotels and tourism sector. Lest the logic of the move should be misconstrued and dubbed as a veiled attempt at rolling back the government&rsquo;s liberalised foreign investment regime, the central bank&rsquo;s concerns in this area should be placed in the right context. The present policy allows hundred per cent foreign investment in the hotels and tourism sector through the automatic route. In other words, any foreign entity can enter the sector entirely on its own and without seeking the mandatory clearance required from the Foreign Investment Promotion Board. All it needs to do is to apply to RBI for remitting the money for the project.

Managing foreign flows

In a useful and comprehensive restatement of India&rsquo;s core values, principles, interests and desires, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh enunciated what may be regarded as the &lsquo;six principles&rsquo; of India&rsquo;s &lsquo;new phase of development&rsquo;.

Manmohan's Malaysia musings

There are many good reasons for the cautious and conservative approach the Union finance ministry has adopted towards direct tax reform. Expectations of a radical reform of tax policy have understandably been belied because of the government&rsquo;s cautious approach. The most important reason for such cautious conservatism would be the likely revenue implications of the changes being proposed.

Decoding the tax code

There is absolutely no denying the fact that the sight of rotting food stocks on the one hand and hungry poor on the other is a blot on government and governance in India. Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar deserves all the rap on the knuckles that the country&rsquo;s highest judiciary can give. Indeed, Mr Pawar ought to step down apologising for his inefficiency in handling the food and agriculture ministry.

SC for Santa Claus

Incisive columns and editorial comment by top opinion leaders

Page 524 - Editorial Comment