What the crash in company orders means for Budget projections

Don't assume a recovery

Business Standard

Tariff fixation has become such a politicised exercise that the institution is losing its importance in the national transport infrastructure

Shanti Narain: Why the Railways needs a tariff regulator

Apollo Tyres stock jumped 3% on Friday after CLSA Mauritius hiked its stake in the company to 5%. CLSA's stake increase in the company follows the go ahead by RBI on February 14 to Apollo Tyres to increase its FII limit under the portfolio investment scheme to 40%.

Higher competition, falling demand could squeeze margins of Apollo tyres

It is unwise to mock Scientology for its beliefs. The Church, sometimes called a cult and sometimes seen as the world's youngest religion, believes that a tyrannical overlord called Xenu imprisoned quasi-gods called Thetans and shipped them to the planet we now know as earth.The aim of Scientology  set up by science fiction writer L Ron Hubbard, gifted at coming up with names like Xenu and Teegeeack  was to return us Thetans to our divine state as we progressed through various stages of enlightenment. This process is known as Going Clear, the title of Lawrence Wright's powerful book on Scientology. Despite the layperson's reaction to the idea of Xenu and frozen Thetans, there is little unusual about Scientology. If you can believe in a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and talking snakes, or in the idea that a lotus flower springing from a God's navel creates the Creator of the Universe, Xenu is as good an explanation as any for the human predicament.

Nilanjana S Roy: Gods in the brain

We must learn from other developing nations adopting biotech crops

Surinder Sud: GM crops - India falls behind

The face-off between Free, an internet service provider (ISP) in France, and Google is an interesting flashpoint in the evolution of digital media. Free blocked advertisements on Google and demanded a revenue share. Its contention was that YouTube and other bandwidth-guzzling services from Google create the need for more investments in pipes, servers and other hardware and software. But the firms gaining from this investment, namely Google or other aggregators, do not share the increased revenues they get as a result.There are several arguments against this. You could argue that Free is an ISP and so it gets its money from subscribers. Why, then, should Google or Yahoo or any other aggregator give it a revenue share? Then there is the principle of Net neutrality, or the idea that an ISP should treat all data packets passing through its pipes equally.This is where our perceptions about the media market and its economics start coming undone, because the permutations and combinations are

Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: Google versus the rest

It is dangerous to draw conclusions from the effects of austerity in many of the places it has been tried

Daniel Gros: Austerity and small economies

The recent bloodbath on equity markets worldwide has given observers an eerie feeling of d&eacute;j&agrave; vu that a global economic crisis is kicking in as it did in 2008. Substitute Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers for Greece, Spain or Italy and the parallels between the Fall of 2008 and the present become evident &mdash; notably, as to how the financial troubles of investment banks or insolvent Euro economies can trigger a sharp downturn in economic activity.

N Chandra Mohan: Watch out for Europe 

Residents of Mumbai&rsquo;s tony Peddar Road, and workers from a political party were locked in an unseemly scuffle at a recent public hearing over a flyover project. The residents claimed that &ldquo;public purpose&rdquo; sought to be served by the flyover was not commensurate with the disturbance to their comfort zone.&nbsp; The politicians on the other hand, asserted their right to have the flyover built on the ground that the locals&rsquo; opposition was hurting the interests of the rest of the city.

Robbing Peter to pay Paul is a recurrent theme

Factories often manufacture voluminous products such as cranes, lifts, turbines, towers, boilers, power plants etc. which cannot be cleared as one piece and transported to the consumers' place. They have got to be cleared in parts and assembled at the site. Sometimes a few bought out items are also added at the time of erection at site. This leads to controversies about whether a complete article has been cleared from the factory or only parts.

Classification of goods in CKD/SKD condition in central excise

In response to last week&rsquo;s column, many readers have asked for more details regarding the Indirect Tax Ombudsman Guidelines, 2011 issued by the Finance Ministry. I give here the essential details.

Indirect tax ombudsman likely to help speed up work

&ldquo;WHENEVER a foreign investor operates within the territory of a host country, the investor and its properties are subject to the legislative control of the host country along with the international treaties or agreements,&rdquo; a five-judge Constitution bench of the Supreme Court declared last week. Deprivation of property may cause serious concern in the area of foreign investment, especially in the context of international law and investment agreements.

Foreign investors must heed Indian laws, says SC

Given his falling personal popularity ratings, the inability of the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government to regain political initiative from a divided Opposition and faced with an unfriendly media that remains enamoured of non-governmental activists, it is not surprising that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh chose to use his eighth Independence Day address from the ramparts of the Red Fort both as a report card and a reality check. The fact is that Dr Singh has much to be proud of as prime minister. Not only has he given India seven years of unprecedented economic growth, with its ups and downs, but he has also made the growth process more inclusive, financing major programmes for rural development and employment, health and education. His claim that the UPA has prevented communal conflict in the face of provocations from terrorists is well founded.

A reassuring address

It may be a coincidence, but the cabinet reshuffle appears to have energised the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA), going by the flurry of the various circulars which are being issued almost on a daily basis, on best practices to be pursued by the various regulators.

Movements In MCA

Goods imported in completely knocked down (CKD) condition are complete goods or just a conglomeration of parts&mdash;that is the question in customs . It has been so for long . Judging from the number of decisions given by the Tribunal this year and every year and considering the several High Court and Supreme Court judgements also, the issue needs some introspection in totality which this treatise proposes to do . Issues are two.

Classification of goods in CKD/SKD condition in Customs

Finally, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (&ldquo;SEBI&rdquo;) is doing it &ndash; the heavily bandaged and plastered takeover regulations, which have been crying for a review, are being replaced. However, SEBI&rsquo;s board has shied away from fundamental systematic reform.

Distorted reform in takeover law

AN arbitration agreement in an unregistered deed can be enforced and acted upon for dispute resolution, the Supreme Court has stated in the case, SMS Tea Estates Ltd vs Chandmari Tea Co. Even if the deed is compulsorily registrable, this principle will apply, the court said. The dispute in this case arose over a 30-year lease of two tea estates between the parties. When disagreement arose, Chandmari company evicted SMS estates. So the latter applied for arbitration.

Arbitration agreement does not need registration: SC

Despite her charm and wit, Pakistan&rsquo;s Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar clearly does not have a face that could have launched a thousand megawatts! Mistrust between India and Pakistan is alive and well, fleeting moments of bonhomie notwithstanding. Pakistan&rsquo;s recent decision to decline India&rsquo;s offer to supply electricity is unfortunate. Even more disturbing is the logic on which this decision was based.

Photo-op diplomacy

Sustainable mining is an oxymoron. Environmentalists will tell you this. Mining &ndash; from coal to limestone &ndash; destroys forests, devastates mountains and leaves the land pock-marked. It also destroys people&rsquo;s livelihoods and displaces them. Worse, modern, mechanised mining hurts livelihoods based on land but does not replace them with local employment &ndash; estimates show that direct employment in the mining sector has fallen sharply.

Sunita Narain: Towards beneficial mining

Telecom services, especially mobile telephony, is clearly one of the most successful examples of India&rsquo;s economic reform agenda since the early 1990s. Fourteen years ago, from a state-owned monopoly, the telecom market was thrown open to private and foreign players.

Chandra Mohan: India as a telecom hub 

The United States of America has revealed all its weaknesses and vulnerability in the past month of political bargaining and brinkmanship on a national plan for government debt reduction. While the deal at the eleventh hour between the Republican and Democratic parties may have brought the markets around the world relief, sending even Indian stock market indices up and softening the prices of gold and other commodities, these immediate responses hide enduring concerns, both within the US and globally, about the resilience of the US economy, the sagacity of its political leadership and the quality of its economic management. The $2.4-trillion spending cuts, spread over a ten-year period, to which US President Barack Obama has agreed would deflate an already faltering recovery. In a classic pre-Keynesian act, President Obama has surrendered to the domestic Ayatollahs of supply-side economics, now reincarnated as Tea Party enthusiasts in the land of coffee drinkers.

The price of brinkmanship

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