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

Business Standard

Many years ago, someone asked me to define development and I thought about it and the simplest answer I could improvise was that development is about widening human choices. In the telecom sector, what we are witnessing today and what we have witnessed in the last decade, is a shining example of how our telecommunications services have helped to widen human choices in a very important area of the nation&rsquo;s economic activity.

'Development is about the widening of human choices'

Statistics can turn the world upside down, especially government statistics that falsify its own claims.

Sreelatha Menon: The curious case of leaking dams

Global cotton shortages and rising yarn prices are causing severe distress among Indian handloom weavers, necessitating a relief package to alleviate the problem.

B Syama Sundari & M S Sriram: Collateral effect - Global shortage, local impact

A recent spate of dam-building in the eastern Himalayas has agitated an entire stretch of lower riparian regions over water-sharing issues. China&rsquo;s planned series of dams on the Yarlung Tsangpo &mdash; the upper catchment basin of the Brahmaputra in southeast Tibet &mdash; has India worried, while dams being built in Arunachal Pradesh are agitating lower riparian Assam.

Keya Acharya: Looming crisis in the eastern Himalayas

Wait on the sidelines until the Nifty touches 4,500-mark.

Be ready for a bear hug

Finally the winter of discontent, and I don&rsquo;t mean the background to the Cabinet reshuffle, appears to be receding in the light of the green signals emitting from the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MOEF). The announcement of the Coastal Regulation Zones (CRZ) notification was long overdue.

Balance needed in industrial development, national needs

Foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows into India in 2010 are said to have decelerated by 31% in 2010, according to a report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), which is based on data from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand, are reported to be beneficiaries of higher FDI inflows during the year.

Deceleration in FDI is no surprise

An order of the consumer commission can be executed by a civil court and hyper-technicalities should not stand in the way, the Supreme Court stated last week in the judgment, HKK Bail vs Cyma Exports (P) Ltd. In this case, a person filed a complaint before the Karnataka consumer commission about not delivering a flat promised by the building company. The commission asked the builder to complete the work and hand over possession with interest on the payments. The order was final. But when the consumer moved the civil court to execute the decree, the company challenged the jurisdiction of the civil court. The latter rejected the objection but asked the consumer to move a Mumbai court as the company was registered there. The consumer then appealed to the Supreme Court. Allowing his petition, the Supreme Court remarked: &ldquo;It is because of these hyper-technicalities that the judiciary is getting a bad name. All sorts of objections are raised to linger on the matter as much as possible.

Hyper-technicalities give bad name to judiciary: SC

This was never an issue. This has now become an issue only after a Supreme Court judgment delivered on 9th December 2010 and reported in 2010(260)ELT487(SC) in the case of Commissioner of Customs (Prev.) Mumbai vs. M Ambalal &amp; Co Supreme Court has said in this case that smuggled goods confiscated and redeemed on payment of fine in lieu of confiscation would not be allowed to avail of an exemption beca-use the goods are &lsquo;smuggled goods&rsquo; and therefore are not &lsquo;imported goods&rsquo;. The Court said the following: &ldquo;We are of the view that smuggled goods will not come within the definition of imported goods for the purpose of the exemption notification, for the reason, the Act defines both the expressions looking at the different definitions given to the two classes of goods: imported and smuggled, and we are of the view that if the two were to be treated as the same, then there would be no need to have two different definitions&rdquo;.

Right rate of Customs Duty for smuggled goods

The new Union minister for petroleum and natural gas Jaipal Reddy can implement the brightest ideas from the smartest bureaucrats and yet the root of the problem that resulted in the murder of Mr Yashwant Sonawane, a district official in Maharashtra who sought to curb the adulteration of petrol by the kerosene mixing mafia, will not be touched unless India&rsquo;s fuel pricing policy is shaped by the logic of simple economics. Various estimates have been provided in the past few days of the size of the domestic black market in kerosene. Some put it upwards of Rs 16,000 crore annually. This is a huge amount of money that can finance large and even globally powerful mafias, not to mention two-bit gangsters like the ones who killed Mr Sonawane. There was a time when Mumbai was in the grip of smugglers. With some simple policy steps like lower tarrifs, liberalization of gold imports and such like these all-powerful mafias were marginalized and largely confined to Bollywood movies.

Death by policy

Between the Reserve Bank of India, the Union finance ministry and the army of economic advisors that surround Prime Minister Manmohan Singh no one seems to have a clue about how to get a grip over food inflation. Not only has the recent episode of high food prices seen surprisingly sharp spikes in the prices of vegetables and fruit but it has lasted longer than any other episode of inflation in recent memory. At the end of a long consultation earlier this month the prime minister reportedly said in exasperation that nobody seemed to know what to do! Apart from the usual mantras on the pursuit of supportive monetary and fiscal policies, the only other substantial idea forthcoming related to the reform and liberalization of agricultural product markets. Economists have expressed surprise that higher prices do not seem to be sending adequate market signals to the producer to increase supply.

Hunger for ideas

In the backdrop of the ongoing heated debate on the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG)&rsquo;s report on the 2G spectrum allocation, it seems many of the apprehensions could arise due to limited appreciation in the public mind about the audit process per se and the functioning of the national auditor. It would not be inappropriate at this juncture to look at the role and functions assigned to the CAG by the Constitution.

K P Shashidharan: Not a blood hound

A V Rajwade: China's superpower syndrome

The political class mocked rapid economic growth in the days when it was 9.5 per cent annually. The rest of the world celebrated the fact that India had become the second-fastest growing economy (it is now down to fourth or fifth), but no one mentioned it at the Youth Congress jamboree in New Delhi earlier this week. Government ministers stopped trying long ago to create a climate in which reform could enjoy traction.

Now, inclusive non-growth

A spate of dysfunctional actions and retrograde developments has led to an unimaginable mess for India. Can the damage to growth prospects be undone? Does it need to be? If so, how? Three areas are discussed below.

Shyam Ponappa: Healing self-inflicted wounds

These are hard facts and well known. Half the world&rsquo;s mega cities &ndash; 13 out of 27, with populations of over 10 million &ndash; are in Asia, as also are half of all its tier-II cities &ndash; 194 out of 387 &ndash; each with a million or more inhabitants. And the region is urbanising at a speed that no other region in the world currently matches. By 2050, Asia will have 3.4 billion people living in its urban areas against the 1.7 billion now.

Barun Roy: Asia's mega problem

Plans to provide around 73,000 villages with bank branches lag targets so badly as to make a mockery of financial inclusion as a social goal.

Indicus Analytics: Off the Bharat track

Few laws can claim to be as comprehensive and far-reaching in their sweep as the revised Companies Bill, 2011, which the Union Cabinet approved last week. It is supposed to be tabled during the winter session; if Parliament manages to find time to consider and approve it, then India Inc&rsquo;s long wait &ndash; almost 18 years &ndash; for a new law governing companies should finally be over. Many would, no doubt, like to believe that this inordinately long wait has been worth it.

Two steps forward, one back

Opinion is building up within the government against telecom companies that have allowed intra-circle roaming for third generation or 3G services. Essentially, under this arrangement, companies that don&rsquo;t have 3G spectrum can hire it from those that do. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, the law ministry and some wings of the Department of Telecommunications or DoT want these agreements to be declared illegal, arguing that the licence agreements do not allow such sharing of spectrum. Since the spectrum was given to companies so that they could roll out their 3G services, the renting out of spectrum by the telecom companies has caused a revenue loss to the government, they insist, though nobody has as yet tried to quantify that loss.

Much ado about nothing

Boy, these past couple of weeks have been a riot, with everybody talking about 55, 57, even 60 rupees to the dollar. It&rsquo;s as if the market suddenly woke up and noticed that India has a large and growing current account deficit; that global markets are under severe stress, with the focus primarily on European sovereign debt but, from time to time, switching back to how much US politics is beginning to resemble Indian politics; and, of course, Indian politics.

Jamal Mecklai: Where will the rupee be in six months?

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