The committee formed by the human resource development ministry to examine objections to political science textbooks issued by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has submitted its 39-page report, which has come in for predictable criticism. The Thorat committee recommended that 21 cartoons be deleted and some other changes be made to the textbooks for next year. The report will now be examined by NCERT&rsquo;s textbook-monitoring committee. This transparent process of review and consultation should set at rest concerns, loudly expressed earlier, that the &ldquo;political class&rdquo; wished to stifle academic voices by exercising raw power to short-circuit institutional channels.

Cartoon history

Business Standard

Over 400 pilots of Air India have ended their 58-day agitation after the Delhi High Court ordered them on Tuesday to resume work immediately and asked the airline&rsquo;s management to look into their demands. All this while, the civil aviation ministry, now led by a very firm Ajit Singh, was adamant that it would not bow to pressure tactics, and even terminated the services of some 100 pilots.

No more arbitrariness

Since the privatisation of power distribution in Delhi in 2002, the average domestic electricity tariff has seen a rise of 107 per cent. It was Rs 2.50 a unit in 2001-02 and &ndash; after last week&rsquo;s increase of 24 per cent with effect from this month &ndash; has gone up to Rs 5.17 a unit. This latest hike comes after another steep increase, of 21 per cent, in September last year. Perhaps to ensure that the agitation against the privatisation of power distribution was not fuelled by steep hikes, the average domestic power rates saw only a modest rise in the first eight years of the change in ownership of Delhi&rsquo;s&nbsp;distribution entities. But now that power rates have been raised steeply in two successive years, questions are bound to arise about the justifiability of doubling tariffs in a decade.

CAG's next task

Self-regulation is a rarity in any industry in India, so there can be no argument that the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) has set a good precedent by putting out a voluntary recall policy for its 46 members. SIAM represents an important and highly visible segment of the manufacturing sector, so the initiative is a trendsetter of sorts for industry in a country with insufficiently robust consumer rights.

Failing the test drive

The success of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in finding a Higgs boson and the implications thereof have been obscured by two coincidences of nomenclature in the Indian media. Some commentators have realised, decades after the event, that an entire class of particles with integral spin is named after an Indian, Satyen Bose.

Behind the Higgs

On Sunday, the Delhi Airport Metro Express shut down for at least a couple of months. The exact duration of the line&rsquo;s closure is uncertain, though it is claimed that services will be resumed by the end of August. The Airport Express was planned as a marquee project; it was to be India&rsquo;s fastest metro line, the first to be built under a public-private partnership (PPP). Indeed, it was seen not just as a test case for similar experiments in other cities, but also as a highly visible landmark of large-scale PPP in the infrastructure sector. The new Five-Year Plan is believed to rely heavily on such partnerships to expand India&rsquo;s inadequate infrastructure. This shutdown, therefore, will inevitably raise several questions about that model. It is, thus, doubly important that the many issues revealed by the Airport Express be satisfactorily addressed.

Line of argument

Both acclaim and accusations have been hurled at the UPA&rsquo;s landmark scheme, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee programme, or MGNREGA. Usually, the reasons for the criticism or praise are less-than-completely supported. For example, it has been both praised and condemned for providing local wage employment to the jobless, thus curbing outmigration; similarly, it is claimed that the scheme has pushed up agricultural wages &mdash; thus either uplifting the living standards of the rural poor or contributing to agricultural crisis and food inflation, depending on one&rsquo;s view. Farmer organisations, in particular, have focused on what they have said is a labour crunch acute at peak times, such as when sowing and harvesting are to occur. This cry is loudest in the intensively farmed northwest and south.

Demand, not supply

Karnataka is getting its third Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief minister in four years with the exit of Sadananda Gowda 11 months after he assumed office. Mr Gowda&rsquo;s departure has been engineered by the same person who installed him in the first place &mdash; the then outgoing chief minister, B S Yeddyurappa. The two fell out almost immediately after Mr Gowda assumed office, when he turned out to be unwilling to step down and return the chair to Mr Yeddyurappa after a cooling-off period. The latter had been forced to resign under the most inglorious of circumstances when he was indicted by the state&rsquo;s Lokayukta on serious charges of corruption. Mr Gowda was hardly able to settle down, eventually having to go on Mr Yeddyurappa&rsquo;s sixth attempt to dislodge him. The incoming chief minister, Jagadish Shettar, will have barely a year in which to establish his credentials before Assembly elections in the state.

New CM, old game

Adidas, the German sportswear and shoe company, has informed the Serious Fraud Investigation Office (SFIO) that it suffered goodwill impairment of Rs 170 crore after it bought Reebok in a global deal in 2005, this newspaper reported a few days ago. This is part of the Rs 870-crore loss that the German sportswear maker says was caused by former employees Subhinder Singh Prem and Vishnu Bhagat. Another report indicated that this has raised doubts in SFIO&rsquo;s mind over the allegations: losses caused by goodwill impairment are notional, and are not commonly shown, supposedly, by Indian companies in their financial statements. In reality, however, generally accepted accounting principles in India do provide for goodwill impairment. Whenever a company acquires another company, it normally pays a premium over the value of the assets on the company&rsquo;s books &mdash; this premium is goodwill.

Transparent goodwill

Any news related to the Bhopal gas tragedy is usually of broken promises or of inaction. So last week&rsquo;s Cabinet decision to approve Rs 25 crore to dispose of some of the waste from the ill-fated pesticide plant once owned by Union Carbide deserves kudos &mdash; even if it comes almost 28 years after the gas leak that killed over 5,000 people and maimed many thousands more.

A step too small

News of the government&rsquo;s proposal that free generic medicines be made available through the public health system can be read in two ways. On the one hand, it is a much-needed step forward &ndash; possibly a game-changing one &ndash; in improving affordability and accessibility in public health. On the other hand, its efficacy will depend on whether simultaneous measures are taken to improve healthcare service delivery, which is in a shambles in most Indian states.

What the doctor ordered?

Law Minister Salman Khurshid has insisted that his statements to The Indian Express on the &ldquo;rudderless&rdquo; nature of the Congress party have been &ldquo;misinterpreted&rdquo;. On the contrary, it appears that they were more than clear enough, and that they accurately reflect the views of a large and growing section of those within the ruling party.

Ideology and India

The broad smile on the faces of the Multi Commodity Exchange (MCX) brass on Wednesday morning was understandable. They would indeed be relieved, as the Securities and Exchange Board of India&rsquo;s (Sebi&rsquo;s) decision to grant permission to MCX Stock Exchange (MCX-SX) to launch stock trading ends an agonising wait of over two years that saw numerous court battles, a slugfest with the market regulator and hectic backroom manoeuvring.

Neither here nor there

The devastating floods in Assam and the continuing scarcity of water in its cities are woeful manifestations of India&rsquo;s mismanagement of water. India may not be a water-rich country, but it is not water-starved either. Its average annual rainfall of around 120 centimetres compares favourably with the global average of 100 cm. Since most of this rain, nearly 89 cm, comes in just four months of the monsoon season, and its geographical spread is also skewed, conservation of rainwater is imperative. This can help moderate, if not wholly prevent, monsoon-season floods and summer shortages. Even the impact of frequent droughts can be blunted to an extent through this approach. Sadly, whatever water management policies have been pursued in the past have failed to promote the conservation of water as well as curb its wasteful use.

Drop by drop

On Thursday, the quick estimates of the index of industrial production (IIP) for the month of May were released, showing a small but significant positive growth of 2.4 per cent after months of stagnation or decline. It is dangerous to read too much into this number. Not only is it very low, but the series itself is notoriously volatile. In fact, the government&rsquo;s statisticians had to simultaneously revise their estimate of the previous month&rsquo;s growth in IIP: it turns out that, in April, industrial production shrank by 0.9 per cent instead of growing at 0.1 per cent, as claimed earlier. Government data series have had a hard time of late, and this difference will not take away from the scepticism with which the IIP is regarded.

Factories floored

Of the world&rsquo;s large economies, only in China and Germany are more than two-thirds of people satisfied with the way their national economies are going, according to the 2012 Pew Global Attitudes survey. In India, it&rsquo;s just under half; in the United States, it&rsquo;s under a third of people. The Pew survey has often been criticised for shallow sampling, but this is nevertheless a useful indicator of the dissatisfaction with government policy sweeping across the world. Even in prosperous Germany, for example, 37 per cent of people think that their government is to blame for economic problems; in Turkey, doing well by most standards, two-thirds of people do &mdash; but India is the highest among large economies when it comes to blaming the government, with 77 per cent of respondents doing so. A legitimate criticism of interpretations based on Pew surveys is that they reflect cultural differences between countries more than the political or economic state of play there.

Divide and survey  

The mutual fund industry will be unhappy that the finance ministry has finally rejected its demand that it be included in the Rajiv Gandhi Equity Savings Scheme announced in this year&rsquo;s Budget, a demand that the market regulator had puzzlingly chosen to support. Under the scheme, first-time investors can claim a tax break on 50 per cent of an investment of Rs50,000 in direct equity.

No concession for funds

The two leading information technology companies, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Infosys Technologies, reported their first-quarter results on the same day, thus dramatically juxtaposing them and offering valuable insights. Although according to certain key parameters the companies belong to the same league, the signals they sent out could not be more different.

IT's different folks

US President Barack Obama is known as a measured, temperate man, and his remarks on the Indian economy in an interview to the Press Trust of India this past weekend should bolster that reputation. He explicitly stated a necessary disclaimer: &ldquo;it is not the place of the US to tell other nations, including India, how to chart their economic future.&rdquo; And then, whatever observations and advice he proffered were clearly demarcated as emerging from elsewhere than his own administration.

The anti-American reflex

The way E K Bharat Bhushan was removed as director general of civil aviation (DGCA) last week points once again to the arbitrary ways of the United Progressive Alliance government. His appointment had been cleared by the appointments committee of the Cabinet, which is headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. According to the rule book, this committee alone has the power to rescind appointments made by it. In this case, it is not clear if Civil Aviation Minister Ajit Singh proposed Mr Bhushan&rsquo;s removal to the committee, or if he removed him on his own. On July 3, when Mr Bhushan&rsquo;s term as DGCA was extended, the Press Information Bureau (PIB) carried an announcement to that effect on its website. But on July 9, when he was removed, no such announcement was made by the PIB.

The sacking of a regulator

If there is anything in common between the record-breaking heatwave in the US, the wettest-ever April-to-June period in the UK and an unusually dry June and floods in Assam of an intensity rare so early in the monsoon season, it is that all these are the likely consequences of climate change. Weather scientists, till recently, were hesitant to connect such divergent events, happening far apart, with a common global cause. That is no longer true. A report released a few days ago by the UK Met Office and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concluded that the extreme weather events in recent months could be linked with global warming.

Time to adapt

Incisive columns and editorial comment by top opinion leaders

Page 616 - Editorial Comment