When the Climate Change Conference at Cancun in December last year concluded with a series of &ldquo;Cancun Agreements&rdquo;, and was hailed as a significant success, I argued that celebrations over the outcome may be premature (&ldquo;Are celebrations premature?&rdquo;, Business Standard, December 15, 2010). The Cancun Agreements constituted a minimalist framework which needed to be fleshed out and finalised for adoption at the next Climate Change Conference in Durban in December this year.

Shyam Saran: The Bangkok sequel to Cancun

Business Standard

The Finance Bill 2011 received the assent of the President on April 8. Most of the proposed legislative amendments to various Acts such as Customs Act, Central Excise Act, etc came into effect from that date.

DEPB scheme may not continue after June

On his journey back home, after a five-day overseas trip that took him to China and Kazakhstan, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made a significant observation about Anna Hazare, the man whose fast-unto-death agitation had forced the government to go on the back foot. Mr Hazare ended his fast only after the Manmohan Singh government issued a notification to set up a joint committee to draft a new Lok Pal Bill to tackle corruption in high offices.

A K Bhattacharya: Dealing with the Hazare aura

India&rsquo;s exports have done exceptionally well in 2010-11, up 37.8 per cent in US dollar terms over the previous year (2009-10). Even if we discount the base effect, given low growth last year, and compare the latest figures with those of 2008-09, which was a more normal one, growth works out to a very respectable 33 per cent. What is more, the trade deficit was down in 2010-11 to 6 per cent of GDP, which is the lowest in the last five years. Additionally, the average nominal value of the rupee has marginally appreciated in the first nine months of the current year. All these facts together may be pointing to a structural shift that is taking place in the global competitiveness of the Indian economy along with a rebalancing of economic forces between the developed and emerging economies.

New trade winds

Credit rating agency Standard and Poor&rsquo;s (S&amp;P&rsquo;s) decision to shift the long-term credit outlook for the United States from stable to negative is yet another reminder that the aftershocks of the global financial crisis of 2008 are yet to dissipate.

America's political deficit

The crisis of governance in India, which has hit with the force of a tsunami, has been brewing for a long time. Its origins lie in the accelerated deterioration in the ethical standards in the political and administrative system. The corruption that we saw in the licence permit raj was cottage industry stuff compared to the organised industrial-scale money making that seems to be common now.

Nitin Desai: The crisis of governance

Even as modern retail gathers momentum, notwithstanding the near lack of support from the government (central and state), a new trend is in the making. This could bring about a fundamental change in retailing as the world thinks of it today and in the way consumers make purchases today. The concept of &ldquo;any time, anywhere&rdquo; retailing is different from the existing retail formats other than those solely based on e-commerce. Physical store retail models may offer extended shopping hours, or even a 24x7 operating environment, but customers still have to go to the store. On the other hand, non-store retailing formats such as TV, catalogue, door-to-door or direct multi-level marketing and tele-marketing offer customers varying degrees of flexibility and freedom in terms of location (where to shop), time (when to shop) and the modalities of making payment and receiving goods.

Arvind Singhal: Shopping any time, anywhere

A M A Muhith, finance minister of Bangladesh, should be a particularly happy person right now. He has won the battle of the rule book and the Supreme Court&rsquo;s sanction to oust Muhammad Yunus as managing director of Grameen Bank. Will Yunus&rsquo; plea for reconsideration succeed? We&rsquo;ve to wait and see. But for now, Muhith has won his pound of flesh. Yunus has bid adieu to his Grameen colleagues and discussed his exit plan.

Barun Roy: Exit, pursued by bureaucracy

The sorry state of maternal care in India has come to the media attention once again. A recent Lancet study noted that India has the highest number of stillbirths in the world, accounting for a little under a quarter of the global total. Significantly, the study pointed out that around 45 per cent of these can be prevented by timely medical attention.

Indicus Analytics: Chronicle of deaths foretold

Even as the Planning Commission says that India&rsquo;s desire to hit double-digit economic growth is being constrained, among other things, by the inability of the farm sector to grow at an annual average rate of 4 per cent a year, largely semi-arid Gujarat, with poor agro-ecological endowments, has reported an average growth rate of close to 9 per cent per annum over the past decade.

Mr Modi's miracle

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been recanting past doctrines ever since the trans-Atlantic financial crisis dissolved the &ldquo;Washington consensus&rdquo;. In a recent report, the IMF has given up an old shibboleth on cross-border capital flows. With emerging markets and developed ones worried about &ldquo;hot money&rdquo; flows and their impact on exchange rates, inflation and asset bubbles, the IMF&rsquo;s neo-conservatism has found new converts. The document has understandably created fissures in the international community, with developing countries feeling the document has not gone far enough in attempting to control capital flows. Developed countries, on the other hand, have been hinting at the dangers of setting a precedent in curbing the free flow of capital. While the truth may lie somewhere in between, the immediate responsibility for restoring a semblance of order in the international financial system rests squarely with the developed economies.

The Fund recants

Does economics influence the course of politics or is it politics that determines the direction of economics? Economists and political scientists keep on asking the question but have yet to find a satisfactory answer. The explosion on the streets of West Asia and North Africa (WANA) is the latest event where such questions have been raised. When Mohammed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old Tunisian fruit vendor, set himself on fire after having been slapped by a policewoman, he must have known that he was making a political statement. However, nobody thought that this one act would lead to the demise of the long-enduring regime of President Ben Ali and would spread to other WANA countries that had been weighed down by ossified regimes for decades. The Tunisian president lasted for ten days; his Egyptian counterpart resisted longer but had to leave after 18 days of protests on the streets of Cairo.

Shahid Javed Burki: Pakistan's new political economy

A recent vacation in Himachal Pradesh introduced me to the prosperity of the state. All the three sectors &ndash; industry, agriculture and services (tourism) &ndash; seem to be doing well. There are few signs of poverty and every sign of buoyant consumerism. The traffic of trucks along the main highways is strong and the car population is dense. One particular model that seems popular is the Nano &mdash; red, silver and yellow.

Bhupesh Bhandari: Tata Nano's road to recovery

India&rsquo;s free trade agreement (FTA) with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), which kicked off in January 2010, is perhaps the country&rsquo;s most important trade agreement because it is integral to its &ldquo;look east&rdquo; policy of integration with Asia. The 10-member Asean&rsquo;s combined GDP of $1.5 trillion is not very different from that of India&rsquo;s GDP of $1.2 trillion. An FTA, thus, is bound to open up a substantial market for our goods. India, too, can benefit from services trade with Asean. Greater engagement with this grouping will spur the globalising drive of India Inc eastwards as it forms partnerships, alliances and joint ventures to leverage the bustling business prosperity of this region.

N Chandra Mohan: Two-way trade street

Now that Anna Hazare&rsquo;s hunger strike has persuaded the government to reconsider its policy on the Lok Pal Bill, it is timely and relevant to examine the use of hunger strike as a tool for persuasion. Whenever there is a dispute between two parties (for instance, between an employer and employee or a producer and consumer) the first stage of trying to resolve the issue is through an oral representation or a discussion. The next step will be a written representation that may lead to a discussion and possible resolution of the issue. If that does not succeed, the parties can go to a government-appointed regulatory body (for example, the labour commissioner). If that also fails the aggrieved party can go to the court of law, pursuing it through the several layers of court &mdash; small causes court, high court and the Supreme Court. Simultaneously, the trade union can instigate go-slow tactics at the workplace, which can put pressure on the employer.

T Thomas: Hunger strike or blackmail?

One pitfall of getting older is that often when I reminisce about my childhood to the younger generation, they reach the conclusion that I must have been young roughly about the same time as Methuselah. Last week, for instance, we found ourselves on Okhla Barrage, stuck behind a long line of cars. &ldquo;We used to come here for picnics when I was your age,&rdquo; I said to my kids, &ldquo;kids your age used to dive in the river to pick up coins that people threw in&hellip;&rdquo; My 12-year-old was aghast. &ldquo;Did they come out alive?&rdquo; I looked at the waves of toxic white-foam over the water and realised that my son had never seen the Yamuna clean. To him, Yamuna was that inconvenient river that sent up putrid odours across the DND flyway that even the car air-conditioning couldn&rsquo;t keep at bay.

Geetanjali Krishna: A river flows through it...

In another age, certainly in the years preceding independence, but perhaps even if the Privy Purse had not been withdrawn, it is possible that I might have had to shear off my (admittedly scant) locks as a mark of respect to the deceased titular head of the Kachchawa clan. &ldquo;Maharaja&rdquo; Bhawani Singh of Jaipur &ndash; referred to as Bubbles by those who knew him even in passing, though rarely to his face &ndash; was the head of a dynasty that had prospered greatly under pacts with the Mughals and the British. This brought the house a certain disrepute among peer clans who fought rather than befriended the enemy &ndash; prompting my wife these many centuries later to label me, somewhat unfairly, a &ldquo;sycophant&rdquo;, even though our branch considered itself renegades &ndash; and the legitimacy of the marriage of a princess of the royal house to Emperor Akbar is still hotly debated, contested, and flung in the face as a suggestion of cowardice.

Kishore Singh: Saved from Royalty fee

As we catch our breath between the incessant fashion weeks in India, I find myself wondering when our fashion will finally get its due internationally. Remember the time before Sir Salman won the Booker and India was still the ing&eacute;nue at the international literary ball? Indian fashion seems to be on the verge of its own Midnight Moment.

Fashioned in India

Restaurant magazine&rsquo;s list of the world&rsquo;s 50 best restaurants comes as close to being the definitive listing as you could get, with a panel of judges drawn from all sections of the industry.

Absent: Indian cuisine

The past month has seen the deaths of many film performers, most famously Elizabeth Taylor, who was everyone&rsquo;s idea of what a Movie Star should be: someone who is the natural centre of every frame she appears in. Stories about Taylor's screen presence &mdash; right from the time she was a little girl, in films like National Velvet &mdash; are the stuff of legend, and her most high-profile film as an adult, the bloated, forever-in-the-making Cleopatra, seemed to be more about the actress than the Egyptian queen.

They also served

Importing and marketing wine in India is quite a challenge (if one does it legally) &mdash; the intrepid importer has not only to comply with multifarious requirements and demands of central customs and state excise departments, he also has to convince the somewhat jaded hotel managements and retailers to stock and sell their wares.

One hurdle after another

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