The shareholders of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have been forced to look for a new managing director earlier than they had been prepared for. It was an open secret that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who has resigned this week following a sex scandal involving an accusation of rape, was planning to declare his candidature in the French presidential elections sometime this summer, perhaps by July. The IMF would then have had to look for a successor anyway. That process has had to begin sooner than expected with Mr Strauss-Kahn&rsquo;s ignominious exit. Several names have been floated in the media, including that of deputy chairman of India&rsquo;s planning commission Montek Singh Ahluwalia. That this media speculation is only half-informed is clear from the fact that both Mr Ahluwalia and Dr Stanley Fischer, governor of the Bank of Israel and former IMF deputy MD, are above the age limit of 65 that has thus far been adhered to in the selection process.

Managing the Fund

Business Standard

The judiciary in India has become habituated to usurping the role of the executive and seeking to run ministries, government departments, investigation agencies and the police. It seems the armed forces are the only institution that the judiciary has not yet stepped in to berate, instruct and supervise! In recent months, the judiciary has pronounced on matters ranging from euthanasia and caste violence (honour killings) to tax evasion, corruption and even nutrition and food management.

Judicial diktat

On 28 April 2011, the Reserve Bank of India put out a discussion paper titled &ldquo;Deregulation of Savings Bank Deposit Interest Rate&rdquo;, which is available at rbi.org.in/rdocs/Content/PDFs/DPS270411F.pdf. This article reviews the paper and responds to the five questions posed in it.

Jaimini Bhagwati: Deregulating savings rates

Many years ago, when I still smoked and occasionally travelled by bus, it was well established that if you lit a cigarette, the bus would come almost immediately. Indeed, sometimes this was used as a means of accelerating the arrival of the bus.

Jamal Mecklai: Light up and the bus will come

Leena Nair, executive director (Human Resources) of Hindustan Unilever (HUL), calls it &ldquo;leadership moments&rdquo;. Each of the company&rsquo;s leaders at all levels goes through such defining moments seven times a year. That&rsquo;s when they open a dialogue with people reporting to them about their performance.

Shyamal Majumdar: HUL's 'leadership moments'

Writing about how great restaurants take root, the legendary chef Daniel Boulud mentions how very local this process is &mdash; how one good caf&eacute; can inspire two great delis, or a shining Italian trattoria can open up a district to more imaginative regional restaurants.

It takes a Village

Premonitory or what? In last week&rsquo;s column I had written about testosterone-driven, predatory, alpha-males swaggering around, high on power, who, operating from their own sense of entitlement, objectified women.

Mars in a hotel suite

Most people thought West Bengal&rsquo;s new chief minister was getting her he, she and it confused when she blurted out &ldquo;I am a simple man.&rdquo; Poor thing, Mamata Banerjee&rsquo;s well-wishers (which means all the world and his wife since everyone loves a winner) explained, she meant sadharon manush, aam admi, a person rather than a man.

Sunanda K Datta-Ray: A woman by any other name...

Size matters. It grows, expands and contracts. Having unapologetically borrowed the title of a book written by Rem Koolhaas in a reprise to the seemingly infinitely-expanding Indian city, I wonder if its diet of rapidly multiplying populations and high consumptive growth patterns will end in obese proportions of XXXL, where the bounds of the city are no longer discernible, its textures and lines merging, engulfing farms, riverbeds, forests and towns into a seamless urban amalgam. While the imagery of such a proposition may be accused of being science fiction, it may unfortunately be a futuristic truth. Projected, predicted and packaged by many a recent report.

S, M, L, XL

As a movie buff, one of the best pieces of news I&rsquo;ve heard recently is that Satyajit Ray&rsquo;s 1958 film Jalsaghar (The Music Room) has received the Criterion Collection treatment. For any poor soul who doesn&rsquo;t know what that means, here goes: high-definition print restoration, carefully assembled special features, and artistic packaging that shows discernment as well as respect for films and film history.

India on Criterion

Richard Burton, that incredibly handsome British actor, reportedly slept with three different women every week for close to thirty years! That is a tale about power, wealth, fame and sex.

L'affaire Dominique

Not only is the Pakistani public angry, but this is the first time in the country&rsquo;s 63 years that the Army chief and the head of the ISI have had to appear before the legislature to offer an explanation.

Suhasini Haidar: In the line of fire - the Pak Army, post-Osama

I am happy to be among people who have the honour to be in this city of Varanasi, which is a centre of education and learning. This city is the capital of religion and culture. The Congress has deep roots here. Freedom fighters, such as Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya to Sampurnanand to Kamlapati Tripathi from this place, served both the state and the nation with distinction.

'Brutal atrocities on farmers shameful'

Goodluck Ebele Jonathan of the Peoples Democratic Party will be sworn in as the President of Nigeria on 29 May following elections that have been generally acclaimed to be fair, free and credible by most observers.

Parvathi Vasudevan: Nigeria's golden hour of development

The city glitters. There is the Metro rail with its sparkling floors and railings, with nice food stalls inside, just like little boxes as if they were from a toy story. Who can tell if it is Singapore or Delhi? Young boys and girls &mdash; some dropouts, others still students from distant villages and, sometimes, from the city itself &mdash; are behind the maintenance of the Metro stations and their kiosks. They should have been considered fortunate to have found work there. But appearances cannot be more deceptive. Many work on less than half the legal minimum wage entitled to them, and are also denied any weekly off or leave. The only &lsquo;privilege&rsquo; is that they don&rsquo;t have to work for 24 hours. They work only eight hours a day.

Sreelatha Menon: Labour rights taken for a ride

Data tracked by traders can prove useful to investors.

From a trader's toolkit

Can you love tigers but hate forests? This question troubled me as I visited central India last fortnight. I was in Nagpur, where local politicians, conservationists and officials were discussing what needed to be done in this chronically poor and backward region endowed with forests and tiger habitat.

Sunita Narain: Let's rethink growth with forest capital

If a law or regulation operates in a manner that it is unable to achieve the benefits it is intended to provide, then it has to be revisited and revamped. A law is tested in its enforcement, and it is not always possible to anticipate and address all potential risks, particularly if the subject matter is complex. This is more critical for economic laws, as such laws have to keep pace with growth and be constantly updated. For the last decade, Indian law makers have been grappling to make competition law operational and effective. Finally on M &amp; A compliances, there appears to have been a break-through.

In pursuance of a strategy that promotes competition

Last week, India ratified the UN convention against corruption; the ratification comes almost six years after India signed the convention in 2005. The convention, a supplement to transnational organised crime, recognises the need to enhance cross-border cooperation in battling corruption introducing a slew of administrative and legislative measures (for countries) to strengthen domestic legal and regulatory regime. It enumerates application of code of conduct for public servants to promote transparency and accountability in the management of public finances by way of stringent auditing standards. Measures to prevent money-laundering and securing the independence of investigative agencies &amp; judiciary are other aspects that have been dealt with.

UN convention to boost anti-corruption measures

The concept of marketability, the key element of manufacture and therefore of excisability has attracted many Supreme Court judgments and even many more High Court and Tribunal judgments. The latest judgement of the Supreme Court on the subject has added further ramification to the issue by saying marketability is a question of fact and has to be determined on the facts of each case and cannot be strait-jacketed in to pigeon holes. The issue is whether certain general principles are to be followed or it is only to be decided on the facts of the case.

Is marketability only a question of fact?

As I argued last week, &ldquo;the current account deficit, (even) as conventionally calculated, was fairly modest until 2006-07, but has galloped since then.&rdquo; Is the root cause a savings investment imbalance, or does it have more to do with the exchange rate? The point is important because once you attribute it to the former, it logically follows that the exchange rate, or external value of the domestic currency, has no bearing on it. But this is not very logical.

A V Rajwade: Demystifying the deficit

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