Last week New Delhi Television (NDTV) filed a suit in New York against Nielsen Holdings and its affiliate companies for over $1.3 billion in damages. The law suit claimed that the global research firm had fudged television viewership data. Its contention: Nielsen&rsquo;s refusal to invest in its Indian arm, TAM Media Research, and the corruption that led to manipulation of viewership data in favour of some television channels had caused a loss of revenue for NDTV. The lawsuit brings out into the open what the industry has discussed and dismissed for years &mdash; that the sample size for the ratings measurement is very small and that the process lends itself to corruption. It also emphatically reveals that the Rs 33,000-crore Indian television industry has not been proactive on issues that matter for its long-term health. One such is the ratings system; a TV rating is a time-weighted average of the total time that people in sample homes spend watching a certain show.

Hating ratings

Business Standard

That the government&rsquo;s refusal to rationalise the price of diesel in India is blowing a hole right through its Budget estimates for 2012-13 and its own credibility &ndash; leading to a further widening of the fiscal deficit and worsening of long-term inflationary pressure &ndash; is well known. Even a hike to take into account increased global oil prices has been endlessly postponed, and now it looks like it won&rsquo;t happen at all, because of the weak monsoon. The generators used by farmers to power the tubewells that inundate their fields with groundwater are working overtime &mdash; and they run on diesel. Raising diesel prices, it is argued, would add to farmer distress, though of course the government has no problem somehow simultaneously claiming it can target drought relief through an additional diesel subsidy to affected farmers.

A dieselised economy

After over a year&rsquo;s prodding by the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council, or NAC, the government has altered the rules framed under its flagship tribal welfare legislation, the Forest Rights Act (FRA). The NAC&rsquo;s intent was to effectively protect the livelihood security of forest-dependent communities; however, some of the changes may actually exacerbate the already simmering conflict between the FRA and laws meant to protect India&rsquo;s forest and wildlife. The FRA, enacted in 2006, seeks to assure the right of traditional forest dwellers, largely tribals, to use minor forest produce for their subsistence. It gives village assemblies &ndash; Gram Sabhas &ndash; a major say in forest management matters; unsurprisingly, central and state forest departments have disapproved.

A question of balance

The ministry of petroleum and natural gas has released a draft policy for the exploration and exploitation of shale oil and gas. The draft is to be fine-tuned after feedback has been received from citizens, concerned parties, experts, stakeholders and so on. This will hopefully result in a finalised shale policy by April 2013, and the first auction of shale blocks by December 2013, which will not be a moment too soon. The &ldquo;shale gas revolution&rdquo; has transformed the North American energy basket; given India&rsquo;s widening energy demand-supply gap, there is an urgent need to explore this new, non-conventional source. In April 2011, the US&rsquo; Energy Information Administration assessed risked gas-in-place of 290 trillion cubic feet (TCF) with technically recoverable resources of 63 TCF in four of 26 Indian sedimentary basins. Several Indian energy majors have started exploring shale joint ventures abroad in order to develop technical competency.

Planning the revolution

The Indian economy has not yet hit bottom. That is the unavoidable lesson of the figures for industrial production released on Thursday by the ministry of statistics and programme implementation. While the index of industrial production (IIP) series is justly criticised for its flaws and its volatility, its trend is unmistakable.

Not yet hit bottom

In its keenness to be known as a fair referee, the insurance regulator appears set to allow all life insurers &ndash; and not just the Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) &ndash; to increase their stake in a company beyond 10 per cent. In reality, LIC would be the only beneficiary, since no other insurer currently comes anywhere near the 10 per cent mark. In fact, the average stake of all other insurance companies individually in a listed company is 2.5 per cent, with the highest stake being 7.1 per cent. On the other hand, LIC has already breached the 10 per cent mark in 18 companies, since the Life Insurance Corporation Act of 1956 allows it to acquire up to 30 per cent stake in a company &mdash; but only after government approval. The regulatory nod would take away the need to obtain the government&rsquo;s permission.

LIC raises stakes

Millions followed the voyage of NASA&rsquo;s Mars Rover, Curiosity. The excitement hit fever pitch during the &ldquo;seven minutes of terror&rdquo; on August 6 as the 900-kg vehicle decelerated from 21,000 kmph to a touchdown at the Gale Crater on the surface of the red planet. The descent was flawless. The time taken varied less than a second from simulations. As the $2.5-billion (approximately Rs 13,900 crore) Curiosity entered the Martian atmosphere, it deployed heat shields, fired retro-rockets to slow, released a parachute to act as an airbrake, and shed ballast in the form of 75 kg tungsten weights. Curiosity&rsquo;s onboard computers took all the decisions. Mars is about 14 light minutes (252 million km) distant at the moment, which meant there was no question of relaying instructions from Earth mission control. Software is being uploaded to what is now the Internet&rsquo;s most distant node for a battery of experiments to be performed over the next two (Earth) years.

The red planet 

There is no need for breast-beating about India&rsquo;s modest Olympic performance. The fact is that the country&rsquo;s performance is improving, steadily even if slowly. At the present rate of progress, India should figure among the top 20 medal-winning countries two Olympics from now. Don&rsquo;t mock that admittedly modest objective. The fact is that if you are a poor or hot country, you don&rsquo;t do well in Olympic contests. And if you are both poor and hot, the dice are really loaded against you.

Not for the poor and sweaty

Agricultural output may ebb this year owing to an inadequate and erratic monsoon, but that should not obscure the fact that several states have reported sustained and high agricultural growth in the recent past &mdash; including states that have been chronic laggards.

Beating the monsoon

The Indian economy has been plagued by several crises in the last few months. Yet, the nature of India's national conversation of late has been such that it does not adequately capture their complexity and potential for harm to the economy.

The six crises

The performance of the State Bank of India (SBI), the country&rsquo;s largest lender, is in a way similar to that of the Indian Railways. Both, because of their size and critical positioning, are significantly linked to the overall health of the economy. It is, therefore, not surprising that in the first quarter of the current year the bank has reported a sharp rise in non-performing assets (NPA), indicating borrowers&rsquo; inability to service their loans in the present economic environment.

SBI's sharp downturn

The state of professional higher education in India is abysmal. Consider engineering. All told, there are 1.5 million engineering seats in the country. Almost a third of these are unfilled, so about a million engineers are produced every year. Yet, barely 10 per cent of them are readily employable. About a quarter don&rsquo;t know enough English to make sense of the curriculum. The tab for this monumental inefficiency is picked up by the companies that draw from this pool. Every year, they end up spending thousands of crores of rupees to retrain the fresh graduates and make them job-worthy. The situation is no better in business schools. Unlike engineering colleges, the rot has not been measured here. But it can&rsquo;t be vastly different. People are, naturally, disillusioned: the number of students who appear in the entrance examinations for business schools has fallen steadily for three years. There are as many as 300,000 seats on offer; about one-third of this capacity is vacant.

Nine of ten, unemployable

In 1927, Mahatma Gandhi described Katherine Mayo&rsquo;s provocative book Mother India as &ldquo;the report of a drain inspector sent out with the one purpose of opening and examining the drains of the country to be reported upon&rdquo;. This was an odd choice of disparagement, perhaps &mdash; as the Mahatma himself, who saw the improvement of India&rsquo;s villages as central to the independence project, wrote and spoke frequently about sanitation. The primary duty of the Gandhian village worker, he wrote, was to improve sanitation. Nor was it a problem of poverty: &ldquo;our poverty,&rdquo; he wrote, &ldquo;plays a very small part in our insanitary condition.

Unfinished agenda 

The government&rsquo;s ambitious biofuel programme, marred by glitches since its launch in 2003, seems finally to be running aground. While the blending of diesel with biofuel derived from jatropha remained a non-starter right from the beginning, admixing petrol with ethanol &ndash; which took off after several hiccups &ndash; has failed to go beyond an admixture level of five per cent. Even this is getting harder to sustain.

The wrong renewable

Internal migration is crucial for all economies, but especially for those, like India&rsquo;s, experiencing unbalanced growth. It keeps the national economy dynamic, while allowing parts of the country that aren&rsquo;t growing quite fast enough to export their excess labour. Some states depend heavily on remittances from workers who have moved to other parts of India, where their productivity &ndash; and hence wages &ndash; are higher.

Homes away from home

The Delhi government last week announced that the house sparrow would be, from now on, the official bird of the state. The little, chirruping birds were traditionally a familiar part of life in India&rsquo;s capital &mdash; sitting on window ledges and telephone wires, nesting in the spring and flying about at dusk in great flocks. Yet those who have seen Delhi only in the past decade or so will have few such memories; there has been a sharp decline in the number of sparrows in the city, one of the reasons why the state government has chosen to highlight the bird. This decline in the population of the sparrow is not exclusive to Delhi or to India&rsquo;s cities. The bird, which was till very recently abundant over two-thirds of the world&rsquo;s land surface, has disappeared from large stretches now. In parts of north-western Europe, it is even considered to be endangered.

Cities and sparrows

The Comptroller and Auditor-General&rsquo;s report on the Delhi International Airport Ltd (DIAL) as a public-private partnership (PPP) project makes several valid points, but presents a seemingly factual but fundamentally misleading picture of the total financial outcome.

Not such a massive rip-off

At its board meeting last Thursday, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) passed a large number of amendments to its regulations for the capital market. It overhauled primary market rules to induce more transparency and attract retail participation. Other key amendments seek to revive the mutual fund (MF) industry. Mutual funds have seen net redemptions of about Rs 22,000 crore in the past 12 months. On the primary market front, the pipeline of initial public offers (IPOs) and follow-on public offers (FPOs) has dried up due to low retail subscription. Apart from the broad desirability of channelling a larger share of household savings into equity, there is a need to revive PSU disinvestment; retail participation is also necessary to meet Sebi&rsquo;s target of a minimum 25 per cent public shareholding.

Looking for retail investors

The Comptroller and Auditor General&rsquo;s (CAG&rsquo;s) report on coal blocks highlights the Centre&rsquo;s problematic delay in introducing transparent methods for the allocation of natural resources.

A murky sector 

Several sections of the venerable Indian Penal Code (1860) prohibit the &ldquo;unlawful assembly of five or more persons&rdquo;. The objective is to prevent mobs reaching critical mass. Last Friday, the home ministry adapted the principle to mobile telephony in the hope of ending the rumour-mongering that has caused a panicked exodus from Bangalore, Pune and other cities of residents originally from the northeast.

Decoding the panic

The chief ministers of states ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) flew in to New Delhi this weekend, to be felicitated by the party&rsquo;s central leadership. The party&rsquo;s president, Nitin Gadkari, said that all the party&rsquo;s states were posting growth numbers well above 10 per cent, and were the engine of national GDP growth. One of the party&rsquo;s senior leaders, and a former finance minister, Yashwant Sinha, went further, saying that a high growth performance has been achieved by BJP-ruled states &ndash; including those in which it is in alliance with parties such as the Akali Dal or the Janata Dal (United) &ndash; even as fiscal prudence was maintained through the crisis period.

Don't rest on your laurels

Incisive columns and editorial comment by top opinion leaders

Page 614 - Editorial Comment