The report of the Bimal Jalan Committee, constituted by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) in January 2010, on changes in ownership and governance of Market Infrastructure Institutions (MIIs), such as stock exchanges, clearing houses and depositories, has sparked an intense debate.

Gangadhar Darbha: Financial market design dilemmas

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The Union finance ministry has done exceedingly well on the revenues front in the current financial year. In June 2010, it raised about Rs 1.3 lakh crore by auctioning licences for third-generation phone and broadband wireless access services. This was more than three times the revenue it had budgeted. Its target for disinvestment proceeds this year is also within reach. Already, it has collected more than half its annual target of Rs 40,000 crore. With the proposal for a follow-on public offer of shares for Indian Oil Corporation scheduled in March and a few others in the pipeline, the ministry would achieve that target too in the current year.

A K Bhattacharya: Budget faces expenditure blues

Since land is in short supply and they don&rsquo;t make it anymore, there was a series of disputes over this valued asset in which the Supreme Court passed judgments in the past fortnight. The right of the rural people for grazing cattle, surrender of sugarcane fields above ceiling and space for new townships were some of the subjects of intense discord, which were fought up to the final court by village headmen and corporate giants. Significant among them were two judgments of a constitution bench that settled doubts over town planning laws in some states where they conflicted with the central law, the Land Acquisition Act.

M J Antony: Medieval Sultans built cities faster

The prime minister has upheld the coalition principle without tweaking policy or integrity, but the exercise has scarcely addressed the challenges that the country faces today.

Has the PM done enough in the cabinet shuffle?

Naukri.com&rsquo;s monthly Job Speak index for December is notable because it bucked a seasonal trend by actually recording a growth over November. Although the last month of the year usually sees a dip in hiring owing to the holiday season, this year the index was described as &ldquo;stable&rdquo;. Apart from telecom, ITeS and banking, which saw the usual dip, hiring across all sectors was as robust as ever. This suggests that India is firmly back on the growth track and the job market and salaries are expanding exponentially. The bad news: India is headed for a talent crunch. The second point represents much more than just a headache for the HR managers in corporations. The skills gap is no longer one of India&rsquo;s many problems: it is reaching crisis proportions and could well become as critical as land acquisition and infrastructure shortages in constraining growth. The shortage, as any corporation will attest, is universal.

Jobs and skills

India&rsquo;s external debt, as per half yearly balance of payments statistics released by the finance ministry, was $296 billion, a year-on-year increase of 13 per cent. While long-term debt increased by 9.5 per cent to $230 billion, short-term debt registered a sharp increase of 26 per cent to $66 billion. The total external debt increased by an absolute amount of $33.5 billion, of which $6.3 billion (roughly 19 per cent) could be ascribed to a &ldquo;valuation effect&rdquo; arising due to the depreciation of the dollar against other major international currencies. The impact of dollar devaluation on India has expectedly been sharp, given that over half of India&rsquo;s external debt is dollar denominated. External Commercial Borrowings (ECBs), mainly by the Indian corporate sector seeking to benefit from the arbitrage between domestic and international interest rates, are an important reason for the rapidly increasing external debt.

The other debt

It has now become fashionable to be underweight India in portfolios or talk about which stock or sector will get hammered next. In any survey of fund managers one reads, India is a consensus underweight in global, emerging market (EM) and Asian portfolios. Sell-side strategists marketing in Asia and Europe report the same phenomena, deep bearishness on the country and everyone claiming to be either short or below benchmark weight (depending on the type of fund). A major global investment bank reported that in January, their single-biggest demand for downside protection in all of EM was India. So, the stars all seem to be aligned, and India has had a tough start to the year, delivering the worst relative performance of any of the major EM markets. When compared to the developed markets, we have already opened up an adverse performance differential of over 12.5 per cent in less than a month (India down 9 per cent in dollars, US up about 3.5 per cent).

Akash Prakash: A Consensus Trade

Shahid Afridi is the brand ambassador for Dabur&rsquo;s Hajmola digestive candy: Right or wrong? Right, but you wouldn&rsquo;t know because you don&rsquo;t get to see those advertisements here &mdash; the cricketer endorses the brand only in Pakistan. But you can see it on YouTube; it&rsquo;s not very different from cricketer-focused advertisements in India.

Bhupesh Bhandari: Indo-Pak trade in security quagmire

The biggest driver of innovation is, and has always been, war. More R&amp;D resources are poured into developing efficient ways to kill people than anything else. The upside is that many of these innovations are eventually adapted for civilian use. Relatively recent examples include the Internet and GPS (Global Positioning System). Both started as US defence research projects.

Devangshu Datta: Hunting for IEDs

With the Niira Radia tapes controversy in India, Ratan Tata and other leading personalities have asked people to respect their &ldquo;right to privacy.&rdquo; The situation is peculiar since the government is the sole-owner of the tapes, and it is not clear who in the government was responsible for leaking them. Many argue that the information released has no relevance to the purpose of gathering such information &mdash; an income tax-related investigation on Radia.

Somik Raha: What price privacy?

Worldwide there are a significant (though declining) number of people who hand-craft wines from a variety of fruit sources, including grapes. While the wines so made are not necessarily only for home consumption, they are best understood as &lsquo;Craft Wines&rsquo;.

The craft of making wines

The harassment of women on the street is ubiquitous in our lives today. So ubiquitous, in fact, that most women tend to gloss over it or forget about it as soon as it happens.

Geetanjali Krishna: The blank noise of protest

She hated getting up for breakfast in the morning, she dawdled over lunch, she would throw a tantrum when it was time for her to take a walk, but come evening and you could count on my mother-in-law perching herself coyly in the living room, hoping to catch my attention with a sharp cough if I delayed the pouring of alcoholic refreshments. If I was busy, a recounting of family scandals to the kitchen staff was enough to ensure that I did not tarry long, though to their delight, and her daughter&rsquo;s discomfort, there was no guarantee the subject would not come up &mdash; possibly because, when she thought no one was looking, she&rsquo;d be dipping into the bar through the day. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m just tidying up,&rdquo; she would tell her daughter when caught red-handed in the act, though she never failed to upbraid me for hiding the &ldquo;better stuff&rdquo; where it was difficult for her to get at.

Kishore Singh: Withdrawal symptoms

H ard as it is to believe, we are nearing the hundredth anniversary of the start of one of the most important careers in film history.

In the tramp's footsteps

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor says he is maintaining &ldquo;an anti-inflation stance&rdquo;. That is understandable. But he also says other things: the current account deficit is unsustainable, the fiscal deficit too high, the overseas debt too large, and credit growth too rapid. Put it all together and the message can only be that the economy has to slow down.

T N Ninan: The growth assumption

Today, Pakistan is South Asia&rsquo;s sick man. This year &ndash; the financial year ending on June 30 &ndash; if the Pakistani economy grows at all, the rate of increase will be no more than the rate of growth in population. This means that there will be no increase in average income and, for most of the population, income per head will decline. This will add another 10 million to the pool of poverty, bringing the total to over 70 million. In the immediate future, the national output is likely to increase at a rate less than one-half of that expected for Bangladesh and one-third of that projected for India.

Shahid Javed Burki: Pakistan - South Asia's sick man

Baijnath, who used to drive our car, has seen better days. A few years after he came with me to Bangalore from Delhi, his driving licence, which is his lifeline, came up for renewal. He could have got it done by himself but I chose to accompany him to the local Regional Transport Office (RTO). That helped.

Subir Roy: Who are you, anyway?

On her sixty-second birthday as a modern woman, the salt-and pepper, gracefully draped sari and elegant pearls that we were hoping for is lost in a dishevelled visage. She&rsquo;s also turned cruel with age. She has abandoned ahimsa and doesn&rsquo;t hesitate to get rid of people who inconvenience her, sometimes setting them aflame publicly. She also looks askance when others skirt their duty.

Time for a makeover

Shuttling between Calcutta and Delhi, I have made a discovery. There are airports, aeroplanes and flights galore, but no passengers. Not once have I heard that word cross any lips save those, perhaps, of innocents from the interior who are new to the wonders of air travel. For everyone else, there are only guests.

Sunanda K Datta-Ray: The real truth about euphemisms

We&rsquo;re gonna need a bigger boat.&rdquo; William Dalrymple might well have quoted this famous dialogue from Jaws to his able team of organisers at the end of Jaipur Literature Festival 2011. Diggi Palace, the venue, was clearly bursting at the seams. At several sessions the allotted space could not accommodate the scores of people lining up to attend.

Literary ark

Go to any social gathering in the Bay Area, California and you&rsquo;re sure to hear the words &ldquo;start-up,&rdquo; &ldquo;net worth,&rdquo; and &ldquo;earn-out,&rdquo; even before you&rsquo;ve been handed your first glass of Pinot Noir. It&rsquo;s about as inevitable as going to a farmhouse party in Gurgaon or New Delhi and being asked by a fellow guest you&rsquo;ve just met where you live.

Jyoti Pande: From idea to ipos

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