Billboards across the Delhi skyline exhort voters to &ldquo;be Dabangg, be a voter&rdquo;. The odd spelling of the Hindustani word for &ldquo;powerful&rdquo; clearly indicates the appeal&rsquo;s connection to the successful 2011 movie starring Salman Khan. By voting, the Election Commission wishes to imply, the capital&rsquo;s citizens can seize control of their city&rsquo;s political landscape in a suitably Salman-esque manner. The EC has argued that its publicity campaign was responsible for the record numbers of voters who turned out to vote in the recent round of state Assembly elections, and clearly intends to try for a repeat. Unfortunately, it is not exactly being assisted in this noble endeavour by the political parties contesting in Sunday&rsquo;s election to Delhi&rsquo;s three new municipal corporations.

Delhi is not India 

Business Standard

Infosys Technologies&rsquo; fourth-quarter results have been poorly received. The bellwether stock has taken a severe beating, bringing the markets down with it.

Infosys gets a jolt

It will soon be two years since petrol was decontrolled, but few will happily celebrate this second birthday. The government-controlled oil companies that dominate the fuel market continue to sell petrol way below the market-determined price, exactly as was the case in the pre-decontrol era. The promise made then to decontrol diesel prices and allow periodic adjustment in prices of kerosene and liquefied petroleum gas or LPG for domestic use is yet to be fulfilled. Worse, political interference in pricing of petrol has not been discontinued, causing &ldquo;decontrol&rdquo; to be viewed as something as a farce. The policy change in June 2010 should have meant that some margins could be made on the sale of petrol, but state oil marketing companies have continued to lose money sharply through retail sales. Oil companies are upset that they have to make huge losses on petrol sales &mdash; which go uncompensated, unlike for the three controlled petroleum products, diesel, kerosene and LPG.

A bullet still unbitten

The recent arrest of Ambikesh Mahapatra, a professor at Kolkata&rsquo;s Jadavpur University, for emailing a comic strip lampooning West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, highlighted glaring flaws in the laws that made the arrest possible &mdash; the Information Technology (IT) Act, its amendments, and the Rules framed for its implementation. The strip was an innocuous mash-up that combined stock photographs of Ms Banerjee and Trinamool MPs Mukul Roy and Dinesh Trivedi with dialogue from Satyajit Ray&rsquo;s children&rsquo;s classic&nbsp;Sonar Kella. It was printed in the mainstream press and reproduced on several television channels without any fears that doing so would be actionable.

The IT Act's hammer

The decision by the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs to, in essence, hand over Rs 30,000 crore to Air India is among the most unjustifiable decisions in India&rsquo;s recent economic history. The very size of the package is enormous, inviting comparisons with the entire outlay of the rural employment guarantee scheme for this year; it is considerably more than what the central government spends on health. Such comparisons may appear unfair, given that the amount is to be slowly infused into the ailing carrier over eight years, rather than all at one go. It is instructive to note, though, that the government is being stingy in bailing out the Indian Railways, which would want sums much lower than these &mdash; in spite of the fact that Air India matters to, at most, a few percentage points of India&rsquo;s population, and that too the section most able to withstand the marginal increase in fares that would accompany a carrier serving a small fraction of the market dropping out.

An unjustified bailout

When the government is charged with pursuing anti-farmer policies by its own agriculture minister, the indictment needs to be taken seriously. This charge, moreover, has not been made in any political forum, but in a letter addressed directly to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. To lend weight to the allegation, Sharad Pawar has laced his missive with concrete instances of recent retrograde policy measures and actions that may have hurt the farmers. The minister&rsquo;s outburst was seemingly triggered by the decision from a group of ministers not to allow the export of cotton beyond 13 million bales in the current year &mdash; to disallow, it appears, the possibility that fibre prices will recover. In some places they have dropped below the minimum support price (MSP).

Mr Pawar's justified anger

The Reserve Bank of India has done more than it was expected to, and now the central government has no excuses left. The Monetary Policy Statement for 2012-13 that was released by RBI Governor D Subbarao on Tuesday announced a cut in the repo rate by 50 basis points (bps) to eight per cent. The reduction was larger than the markets expected; the consensus was that, if a cut would happen at all, it would be of 25 bps. In taking this action, the RBI has acknowledged that the monetary policy transmission mechanism in India is weak, and that smaller steps are unlikely to be as effective. However, it is instructive to read the entire statement. The RBI continues to be concerned that the economy conceals substantial inflationary pressures &mdash; the upside risk to inflation, it says, is considerable. Given that, it may be overoptimistic to expect this is only the beginning of a sequence of cuts.

No excuses left for Centre

Tickets on Jet Airways and IndiGo, two of India&rsquo;s largest airlines, will no longer be readily available on MakeMyTrip.com, the major online travel agency. The dispute centres on some of MakeMyTrip&rsquo;s marketing techniques, and should be closely watched. As more and more Indians buy products online, conflicts between big online retailers and the bricks-and-mortar producers whose goods and services the internet sites are reselling will only grow.

Clicks, bricks and brands

At the recently concluded London Book Fair, the chief subject of discussion wasn&rsquo;t celebrity book advances &mdash; it was the US Department of Justice (DoJ) antitrust suit against Apple and five major book publishers. The DoJ lawsuit alleges restraint of trade and collusion among five publishers and the computer giant after Apple introduced what it called &ldquo;the agency e-Book model&rdquo;, in effect allowing publishers to set e-book prices higher than many sellers (including Amazon and Barnes &amp; Noble) might have liked. Three publishers settled almost immediately; two, Macmillan and Penguin, are exploring their legal options, and opinion is divided on whether Apple will go the legal distance or try to settle. Some industry experts think the lawsuit will be settled soon; a few think that Apple might be able to successfully fight the charges of collusion.

The iGrab effect

Agni-V, an intercontinental ballistic missile indigenously developed by Indian scientists, was successfully test-fired on Thursday. It was launched from Wheeler Island off the Odisha coast, and took 15 to 20 minutes to reach its designated target in the southern Indian Ocean, over 5,000 kilometres away. The missile has taken four years to develop; this success follows closely on that of Agni-IV last year, which tested many of the mechanisms that are integral to its longer-range sibling.

Reaching ever further

Somewhat offbeat advice has come in from that storehouse of unusual ideas, India&rsquo;s ministry of environment and forests. It has counselled the building of bamboo-based houses in earthquake-prone areas. This might, at first glance, sound odd. This is the 21st century, after all, and many technologies are now available for quake-proofing concrete structures. However, the advice is fundamentally sound. Bamboo is already used to construct houses, and with good results, in several countries in seismically active zones. Japan, which has recently had a series of ruinous tremors, is generally believed to have escaped with a relatively minor human toll thanks to its perfection of quake-resistant construction technologies, some of them decidedly low-tech. Even more quake-susceptible countries like Costa Rica and Colombia have traditionally relied on bamboo to keep the devastation to the minimum.

The strength of bamboo

Chief Economic Advisor Kaushik Basu sounded a warning bell at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, DC, last week, saying that big-ticket reforms would probably have to wait to be carried out for the next government, after general elections in 2014. Professor Basu has since rolled back that announcement a bit, saying that he does not expect all reforms to be stalled and some big reforms, indeed, could be expected in the next six months. However, as he pointed out, the goods and services tax (GST) is an example of an important reform that needs political consensus, and one that the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government seems unable to generate any push towards. Several different factors have combined to create the policy paralysis in which India finds itself today. A timid and divided government is one of them, beset by doublespeak about the benefits of reform and assertive, anti-reform coalition allies.

Can't wait till 2014

Several developments in the Supreme Court over illegal mining of iron ore in Karnataka indicate that only the first chapter of a long-running story has been brought to a satisfactory end. The whole story offers a valuable insight into practices of governance and ways of doing business in India.

Karnataka's mine politics

In the past few years, financial exchanges have experienced several incidents of &ldquo;flash crashes&rdquo; and a few &ldquo;flash booms&rdquo; as well. These are instances when prices shift huge amounts within seconds. They are caused when computers execute trades on massive volumes, entirely without human intervention and according to pre-programmed algorithms. The term was coined following the most notorious of flash crashes, on May 6, 2010 when the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped nine per cent in a minute. The latest incidents occurred last Friday. Nifty futures dropped 6.7 per cent in a minute as 35,000 contracts were offered (1 contract = 50 Nifty) at a large discount. Earlier that same day, Infosys stock futures also dropped 20 per cent for an instant. On March 22, the world's most valuable company, Apple, saw an instantaneous drop of 9.5 per cent in trading on the US' BATS exchange. The stock of BATS itself has suffered twice from similar incidents.

Flash crash fears

The recent comments by Chief Economic Advisor Kaushik Basu at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, DC, were seen, implicitly, as criticism of the government in which he serves &mdash; a consequence, perhaps, of initial reports, which had led observers to believe that he said that major reform was impossible until UPA-II was replaced in 2014 by another dispensation. When taken in context, however, it appears that Prof Basu said nothing more than many in similar positions have already remarked: that political consensus for many reforms is difficult to achieve. However, the furore that followed his statement is a useful pointer to not just the stored-up frustration at UPA-II&rsquo;s policy paralysis. It also points to a deep-seated and widespread confusion as to what the code for public statements should be for members of the government.

Serving in silence

The government hopes to spur India&rsquo;s milk production through the newly launched National Dairy Plan (NDP) and its massive investment of nearly Rs 17,300 crore. This has been provoked by a continuing escalation in dairy product prices caused by a supply deficit. Annual milk production has grown at about four per cent for several years &mdash; but demand has gone up by around seven per cent. The supply-demand mismatch has thus steadily worsened, affecting prices.

Milking progress 

The new recommendations from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, or Trai, on spectrum pricing have led to much public heartburn. Auction reserve prices, according to telecom operators and some observers, have been set inexplicably high, at Rs 3,622 crore per MHz for the 1800 MHz band and Rs 7,244 crore for the 900 MHz band. On worries that these would cause the business to become unviable, and phone tariffs will spike, telecom stocks have fallen for two days in a row.

The cost of auctions 

The announcement by Standard &amp; Poor&rsquo;s (S&amp;P) yesterday to cut its outlook for India from stable to negative should cause no surprise, even though it comes barely five days after a similar exercise by Moody&rsquo;s, which had retained its outlook on India as stable. It is not unusual for credit rating agencies to differ from each other in their assessments, and not much should be read into this divergence.

A call for action

Are several senior ministers stepping down? In an echo of the Kamaraj Plan of 1963, are they choosing to leave a moribund government for an all-powerful party? Are those out of favour being forced out by a newly assertive prime minister or an angry Congress president? In the absence of any real developments, the answers to all these questions are a mixture of rumour and conjecture, not the stuff of news.

Reshuffle hints

To many who remember the politics of the late 1980s, this is a worryingly familiar moment for India. The two periods have several common features: a rudderless government, an insurgent anti-corruption movement, and weakness on the external economic front. The sudden recurrence in the national conversation of the totemic issue of those times, the quarter-century-old Bofors kickback scandal, is thus almost fortuitous.

The shadow of the guns

Philosopher George Santayana&rsquo;s prediction that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it is coming eerily true in the jungles of east and central India, where state governments have encouraged Maoist terror by succumbing to serial hostage deals. The kidnapping of Sukma district collector Alex Paul Menon in Chhattisgarh last weekend came just days after the Maoists in Odisha released an Italian tour operator in return for the handing over of 27 imprisoned members of their group. Odisha legislator and Biju Janata Dal leader Jhina Hikaka, meanwhile, was released on Wednesday after an extended captivity &mdash; one that did not seem to have caused various state governments to draw the obvious lesson of urgently tightening security measures. The Maoist groups in neighbouring Chhattisgarh were quick to read the message from this softening of the state; they are now holding Mr Menon in anticipation of more prisoner releases.

Hostage to blackmail

Incisive columns and editorial comment by top opinion leaders

Page 624 - Editorial Comment