Around the time allegations poured thick and fast at A Raja for selling spectrum cheap to a horde of telecom companies, Ratan Tata created quite a stir at Dehra Dun when he alleged that he was asked to pay a bribe of Rs 15 crore to a minister some years ago when he wanted to set up an airline. In short, corruption thrives in India.

Bhupesh Bhandari: What about corruption in corporate deals?

Business Standard

When this writer was doing his research at the Centre for Development Studies in the late 1970s, Professor Kazushi Ohkawa of Hitotsubashi University gave a talk on Japan&rsquo;s successful economic development and the lessons it held for developing economies. In the early 1990s, the East Asian miracle economies were exemplars of rapid growth. With the global crisis of 2008-09, developing economies are now believed to have lessons for crisis-ridden advanced countries.

N Chandra Mohan: Emerging lessons

For someone who used to consider acquisitions a distraction, and saw organic growth opportunities as India&rsquo;s &ldquo;sweet spot&rdquo;, Axis Bank Managing Director and CEO Shikha Sharma was quick to grab an opportunity for merger when it came her way. After all, it&rsquo;s not often that one gets a chance to acquire the investment banking, institutional and retail equities broking business of a leading domestic player like Enam Securities. In 2010, Enam was ranked third in the Bloomberg league tables for domestic equity offerings with an 8 per cent market share. It also occupies the number one position as a banker for rights issuances in the current year with a market share of 25.4 per cent. But most importantly, it helps India&rsquo;s fourth-largest bank, in terms of market capitalisation, plug a big gap in its portfolio of offerings. Axis, which was topping the debt and loan league tables, was unable to break through the equity capital markets and mergers and acquisitions table.

Banking on synergy

The recently published survey of employment and unemployment in India, conducted in 300 districts across the country, shows once again that without a reform of India&rsquo;s archaic labour laws, the share of salaried employed will continue to remain low. The employment-unemployment survey was conducted by the Labour Bureau of the Union Ministry of Labour and Employment. Public attention has largely focused on the unemployment number that the survey threw up. It shows an unemployment rate of 9.4 per cent in the year 2009-10. That is 94 persons out of 1,000 in the labour force were &ldquo;available&rdquo; for work but not gainfully employed. In absolute terms, this rate yields a figure of approximately 40 million persons. This is a very high number. It is possible that the economic slowdown in 2009, following the global economic slowdown, and the sharp fall in production in export-oriented sectors may have contributed to this.

Employment conundrum

In the past few months, there was a sense of unease in international economic circles that the high levels of current account imbalances could lead to competitive depreciation of currencies. The disquiet stems from an inchoate feeling that the probability of another economic downturn is rising. The tipping point could be one of several other imponderables, e.g. widespread home loan defaults, sovereign debt restructuring among countries on the European periphery.

Jaimini Bhagwati: Current account imbalances

Last month, when the environment ministry declared that the elephant in India would now have the status of a National Heritage Animal, I was thrilled. There&rsquo;s something about these gentle giants that has always fascinated me. Around the same time, the shocking case of the death of seven elephants that collided with a train also came to light. It is said that the adult elephants had died trying to save a calf that was trapped on the railway tracks. I wondered what the government was doing to protect these pachyderms &mdash; for, clearly, merely awarding them the status of Heritage Animals isn&rsquo;t enough. For most local communities railway tracks and highways running through elephant corridors are necessary for their economic and social development &ndash; even though they come at the cost of many elephant (and other wild animal) lives.

Geetanjali Krishna: The jumbo needs better PR!

This, &rdquo; said the Frenchman, looking underdressed in a tuxedo, &ldquo;is India at its best.&rdquo; It was certainly India at its most exotic. A tusker led the procession, complete with the emblem of the royal family of Marwar, the insignia of the Rathore ruler of Jodhpur, followed by a cavalcade of ponies carrying lances and pennants. Behind them, in orderly rows, walked kings and sons of kings. Leading them was Gaj Singh, who had been coronated maharaja as a child, before the abolition of the privy purse, and whose son and heir was now getting married among a gathering of equals at Jaipur&rsquo;s resplendent Rambagh Palace.

Kishore Singh: Lit up in royal glory

The press (including this newspaper) has been screaming blue murder about the spectrum scandal from the time it was perpetrated in broad daylight, nearly three years ago. Not only did nothing happen, the man at the centre of the scandal retained the telecom portfolio when the second UPA government was sworn in, last year.

T N Ninan: Solutions exist

The story of financial engineering, which created more and more complex debt instruments in which tail risk was ignored, is well known (see Gillian Tett: Fools Gold; Raghuram Rajan: Fault Lines). It was induced by the low interest rates during the Great Moderation, and exacerbated by the Greenspan Put. Two lessons, however, are important.

Deepak Lal: Financial engineering

For a movie buff, few experiences can be as fresh or revealing as watching an early film made by a now-celebrated director, or an early film starring a highly decorated actor &mdash; in other words, before the personality in question was beatified or turned into an icon of pop culture.

The pre-icons

It is normal for two students in the same course to be friends and rivals. They are in competition for grades and later, they will angle for the same jobs. But it&rsquo;s in their interests to share notes and cover for each other when bunking, etc.

Devangshu Datta: Of frenemies and coepitition

On the face of it, Delhi has never felt or looked better &mdash; unless you go back to the days when it was a different kind of city. Of dry hot summers and cold clear winters, acquiescing to the label of &ldquo;administrative village&rdquo; unkindly stuck upon it, sporting a single, really big hotel and boasting one major classical music festival.

Subir Roy: May Delhi keep shining

Jawaharlal Nehru and Ghanshyam Das Birla first met in 1924 when Mahatma Gandhi, just out of jail, was recuperating in the industrialist&rsquo;s beach-facing house in Mumbai. A year later, Nehru told Gandhi that he was a little tight for money. Gandhi mentioned Nehru&rsquo;s plight to Birla. Almost overnight, Birla turned up at Nehru&rsquo;s home at Allahabad and offered to help him out of the situation. Nehru was incensed, but managed to conceal his anger from his visitor. This was the beginning of the uneasy relationship between the two.

Political Birla

As a regular Air India passenger, I am not surprised to learn that the airline loves sweeteners. They come in many forms, like extension of service beyond the age of superannuation or productivity-linked incentives. The simplest sweetener was issuing 121 free tickets within a matter of months to an officer for his spouse, children, parents, brothers, sisters, sons-in-law and daughters-in-law, all in the family way. Hindu Joint Family way, that is.

Sunanda K Datta-Ray: Air India's sweet secrets

It&rsquo;s the triple witching hour for the government. Market men will tell you, in their parlance, it is simply a Friday that comes once every quarter, when a series of stock options, index futures and stock futures expires in the last hour of trade. What it does and can do is cause unprecedented volatility and mayhem. And traders who are less than eagle-eyed will get their fingers and books burnt.

The triple witching hour

Let us start with a few caveats. This piece doesn&rsquo;t imply that the former telecom minister, A Raja, was correct in selling 2G spectrum cheap in January 2008. It doesn&rsquo;t indicate that there were no irregularities or a strong whiff of corruption in the manner in which spectrum was allocated to new and existing telecom players.

Alam Srinivas: Right facts, wrong arithmetic

There is this interesting scene from a movie on the singer-saint-composer Tyagaraja. He goes, at the behest of his guru, to a musical gathering at Thanjavur where the assembled virtuosos are sneering at him as a janaranjakudu (an unsophisticated, common mass entertainer). One of the assembled virtuosos sings first, rendering a technically astonishing, intricate piece that requires a great deal of musical discernment and knowledge to appreciate. Tyagaraja then sings one of his hauntingly beautiful kritis, &ldquo;yendara mahanubhavulu, etc.&rdquo; (to all the great ones, my salutations).

Rama Bijapurkar: The bare and simple facts

For a wine fair in only its second year, the recently-concluded Hong Kong International Wine &amp; Spirits Fair (November 4-6) was very well organised: nearly 700 exhibitors from 30 countries and regions, about 14,000 trade visitors (up 19 per cent from 2009), with some 1,300 wines entered for the Cathay Pacific HKIW&amp;S Competition.

Hong Kong's spirited story

When does a law become a guideline? Perhaps when it enters the Indian metropolis, where policy and policymakers use words in so convoluted a manner that their roar is reduced to a whimper.

Godzilla in Mumbai

Indiraji&rsquo;s call for &ldquo;Growth with Social Justice&rdquo; defined the concept of social democracy for my generation. We understood that the two must go together &ndash; the search for growth and the search of social justice. That a developing economy like India needs resources and revenues to be able to distribute them equitably. This calls for both resurgent growth and prudent management of our public finances.

Our economic, social transformation is unparalleled

Fluid situations call for a close watch on stock market prices and premiums. Positions may have to be switched at a moment's notice.

Trading on politics

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