It&rsquo;s an ailing king in Shakespeare who utters the famous line: &ldquo;Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.&rdquo; Asian rulers everywhere, in the wake of deadly contagion of the Jasmine Revolution, must be casting nervous glances in their backyards to check out the symptoms. The ailment is more complex than it appears and further complicated by the uncontrollable virus of instant communication.

Sunil Sethi: India's chameli churnings

Business Standard

Has the time come to admit that Indian socialism is an elitist construct? This week in Mumbai at the release of the book on Fabindia (The Fabric of Our Lives, Penguin) written by Radhika Singh, some of India&rsquo;s leading hand-made people were asking themselves this question.

Absolutely Fabindia!

Mikhail Sergeyerich Gorbachev turned 80 three days ago. He will go down in history as the man who presided over the liquidation of the USSR in 1991. The consequences of that demographic and political earthquake have yet to be fully played out! One major fall out was the disappearance of an alternative point of view on global issues. Gorbachev also erred by giving political transformation priority over economic reform. China did precisely the opposite and succeeded.

K Natwar Singh: Revisiting Russia

Sometimes books create wrinkles in space-time. (I take that to mean that for some reason involving bodies with massive gravity, space-time bends so that a &ldquo;now&rdquo; and a &ldquo;then&rdquo; or a &ldquo;here&rdquo; and a &ldquo;there&rdquo; rub up unexpectedly against each other. It&rsquo;s the stuff of basic science fiction.) That happened recently when news broke of the death of Anant Pai, the &ldquo;Uncle Pai&rdquo; whose name adorned the hundreds of Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) titles of the average English-speaking 1980s Indian childhood.

Now and then

No girl power

Last month, Tejas, a newspaper based in Kerala&rsquo;s Malabar region published the results of a political survey. It made two points: if the Left Democratic Front (LDF) continued with V S Achyuthanandan as chief minister, it could get up to 76 of the 140 seats in the Kerala Assembly elections on April 13; and the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) was not as comfortably placed as it was about three months ago.

Aditi Phadnis: Time to play hardball, Mr Chandy

Move over Rajnikant. India has a new super-hero, a champion of right &mdash; the Supreme Court.

A new superhero

Proponents of a federal structure have one vital statistic up their sleeve when they talk about its success. They observe that over the last three centuries, the richest nation in the world has always had a federal structure.

Y Harish Chandra Prasad: A tale of two Krishnas

Rummaging through a waste bin one day, Raju, a 38-year-old sanitation worker in a leading government hospital in New Delhi, felt a twinge in his ankle. On a closer look, unease gave way to panic. Raju had accidentally pricked his ankle on a used syringe that had fallen out of the bin. As he hobbled into the emergency ward, Raju was directed to the out-patient department (OPD). &ldquo;The OPD was overflowing with patients. I couldn&rsquo;t wait that long. The syringe could be infected. When nothing seemed to work, I covered the wound with a strip of cloth and left. Later, a friend told me that I should use a matchstick to disinfect my wound,&rdquo; says Raju, who did act on his friend&rsquo;s advice.

Shivam Saini: Unhealthy silence

Once upon a time there was a vast forest. Over time, it became overrun by humans. The trees, as well as the animals they sheltered, disappeared, unable to bear the increasing demands of growing populations of people and their cattle. Finally, even the grass vanished from the land, leaving bare hillocks that blazed every night with the fires from a hundred hearths, fires that sent up sooty smoke that obscured the stars above.

Geetanjali Krishna: Farewell to the Tiger Man

Going away on holiday is no longer a matter of packing the bags, patting the dog, hiding the silver, giving the staff enough funds to keep them in food and good humour, and asking the neighbours to pay the utility bills that won&rsquo;t wait till your return. Nor can you take a vacation on a whim &mdash; a trip these days requires as much planning as a corporate presentation, and often with less successful results.

Kishore Singh: Back-breaking breaks

The government has conceded a JPC to inquire into the 2G Scam from when the NDA took office in 1998 onwards. This is a mistake. Though hailed by the Opposition, Parliament &mdash; and the country at large &mdash; might live to rue the day it succumbed to inglorious coercive tactics that denigrate the supremacy of due process and debate in a democracy.

B G Verghese: Of coercive tactics and bad precedents

THE third priority the President says is, &lsquo;to sustain the momentum of economic growth, while ensuring that the poor, the weak and the disadvantaged get a fresh air.&rsquo; Now, this is actually becoming a joke that the weak and the disadvantaged will get a fresh air. Okay, there is a sense of pride that we are rubbing shoulders with the G-20 in the world and having dinner with those mighty Presidents. But, what is happening at the ground level? Isn&rsquo;t it shameful, today, according to the Third National Family Health Survey, 38.4 per cent of our children under three years are stunted &ndash; too short for their age &ndash; 46 per cent are too thin for their age, 79.2 per cent of our children under three years are anaemic? This is our country's future. And, among the pregnant women, anaemia has increased from 50 per cent to 58 per cent during the last two years.

'We are stopping our own selves from being the knowledge leaders'

India is poised to join the coveted club of economies whose national income, or gross domestic product (GDP), exceeds $2 trillion. According to recently released data, India&rsquo;s nominal GDP is expected to grow at 14 per cent in 2011-12, to reach Rs 90 lakh crores. At a dollar exchange rate of Rs 45, this works out to $2 trillion.

Two-trillion India

Today no one argues against the need for a system of good corporate governance to attract capital to the corporate sector. Regulators, which have the responsibility to protect the interest of sharehol-ders, continuously endeavour to improve the standard of corporate governance. There is a trend towards the convergence of the Anglo-Saxon corporate governance model. The corporate governance structure, which requires a balanced board of directors with adequate number of independent directors, is widely accepted. It is also widely accepted that the role of the board of directors is to protect the interest of non-controlling shareholders through effective monitoring. But, in practice, companies do not prefer a monitoring board of directors.

Should Corporate Governance be Voluntary or Mandatory

Earlier pre-budget articles in this column had addressed the various expectations with respect to CENVAT credit on capital goods, disparity in various provisions of the Central Excise Act and in service tax law. Compared to these expectations, Budget 2011 has made some very radical changes to various provisions of the CENVAT Credit Rules 2004 (Credit Rules). These amendments have been made effective either from March 1 or from April 1, 2011. These far reaching changes have ostensibly been carried out with the objective of augmenting revenues and to also simplify complicated legal provisions. This article examines in details the changes made by Budget 2011 to the CENVAT Rules and highlights some of the concerns which may arise, as a result.

Budget 2011 revamps input credit rules

While presenting the Budget for 2011, the Finance Minister observed as under:
To attract foreign funds for financing of infrastructure, I propose to:&nbsp;
&nbsp;

    create special vehicles in the form of notified infrastructure debt funds
    subject interest payment on the borrowings of these funds to a reduced withholding tax rate of 5 per cent instead of the current rate of 20 per cent;&nbsp;
    exempt the income of the fund from tax

In order to achieve the aforesaid objective,

Investment in infra bond: Fin Bill 2011 opens opportunity

The Supreme Court last week reiterated that casual workers cannot claim regularization merely because they have been working for a considerable period of time. It said that the law consistently laid down by it was that casual employment terminates when the same is discontinued. &ldquo;Merely because a temporary or casual worker has been engaged beyond the period of his employment, he would not be entitled to be absorbed in regular service or made permanent, if the original appointment was not in terms of the process envisaged by the relevant rules,&rdquo; the judg-ment stated allowing the appeal of the central government in the case of casual workers who have been engaged with six-monthly breaks up to 30 years. The Supreme Court set aside the order of the Gauhati high court which was contrary to the precedents in the case, and allowed the appeal of the government in the case, Union of India vs Vartak Labour Union.

Casual labourers have no right to regularisation

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh should use the opportunity provided by the Supreme Court&rsquo;s verdict, on the appointment of P J Thomas as chief vigilance commissioner (CVC) of India, and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam&rsquo;s threat, to withdraw its ministers from the Union cabinet and offer outside support, to seek a vote of confidence from Parliament. The PM and his government will, in fact, secure that vote of confidence, both because no political party wants the life of the present Lok Sabha to end, and also because the ruling Congress Party still has numbers with it. In seeking and securing a new vote of confidence, the Manmohan Singh government would also secure a new lease of life. The government has been battered, beleaguered, demoralised and directionless in the past few months. The PM has set in motion several correctives that will help improve governance in future.

Vote of confidence

In the week Taiwan was opening itself up to more investment from China, nearly a 100 Taiwanese business persons travelled to India, under the leadership of Taiwan&rsquo;s minister for economic planning and development, Ms Christina Liu, to invite Indian investment into Taiwan and prospect for opportunities for Taiwanese investment in India.

Sanjaya Baru: Asian drama

If there was ever a decision that proved that the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) isn&rsquo;t doing its job properly, it is its blanket ban on part-time MBA courses. This means that the regulator for technical education will no longer approve such courses and those that are in operation will not be given permission to extend them once they are completed. In other words, by 2012, there will no longer be any AICTE-certified part-time MBA courses. AICTE officials say the rational for doing this is that several B-schools are misusing the facility, running other programmes under the guise of an MBA course and are even recruiting fresh graduates instead of those with work experience. This is undoubtedly true, as any recruiter will attest. But there are also many reputed institutes running decent part-time courses.

Mindless regulation

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