The Lok Pal Bill has once again taken centre stage in Indian politics, after the leaders of India Against Corruption (IAC) organised a token, one-day fast at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi. This comes at a time when crucial, pending Bills have piled up, policy paralysis has frozen the economy, and a large chunk of the Winter Session of Parliament has already been wasted. A strong, independent Lok Pal is in India&rsquo;s interest.

The agitation that won't die

Business Standard

The year 2011 will probably go down in history as the year of the perfect storm for India. Whatever could go wrong, did go wrong. This was a year that India had an opportunity to stand out globally by not so much as doing too many right things but merely by avoiding wrong moves. Alas, we blew the opportunity, thanks to politicians from all walks and to some boo-boos by policy makers.

Rajeev Malik: Politicians' curse versus the RBI

In the last fortnight or so, India&rsquo;s political class has shown that it refuses to change, or recognise the need for change. Consider the following. In a desperate attempt to resume economic reforms, top leaders of the government decide that it should allow foreign direct investment or FDI in multi-brand retail.

A K Bhattacharya: In search of statesmen

As delegates from 194 countries gathered in the South African city of Durban late last month for a United Nations summit on climate change to decide the fate of the Kyoto Protocol on harmful gas emissions, the world&rsquo;s tallest &ldquo;green&rdquo; building, Taipei 101, signed its first &ldquo;green&rdquo; lease with a tenant.

Barun Roy: Old faces, new lifts

The credibility of Indian macroeconomic data is low. The collection is inefficient and, sometimes, the methodology is also flawed. The IIP Index of Industrial Production is dubious &mdash;elements are often not updated for months, causing absurd variations. When the revised IIP is released, the differences with provisional numbers are huge.

Strategies for a bear market

The rupee has been falling for months, losing 17.3 per cent of its value vis-a-vis the dollar since September. Many observers have come to believe that there is little reason to suppose that the rupee will recover before as late as March next year. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI), meanwhile, insists its mandate is merely to minimise volatility in the foreign exchange market, and not to defend the value of the rupee.

Make it a two-way bet

One of the claims made by a representative of the Anna Hazare movement (at their recent meeting with political leaders) was that, as representatives of &ldquo;civil society&rdquo;, they would seek to present legislative Bills to Parliament and then &ndash; as with their Lok Pal movement &ndash; agitate for Parliament to adopt them.

Deepak Lal: Sliding towards participation

What&rsquo;s your favourite film adaptation?&rdquo; a friend asked me last week. I was on my way to participate in a discussion about books being adapted into films, and had naturally been giving the matter some thought. But posed with a direct question of this sort, I realised it was difficult to come up with a straightforward answer. While several excellent films have been based on great, good and mediocre literary works, many of them have taken considered liberties with the source material. And in my experience, most lovers of a book tend to expect slavish faithfulness from the movie version.

Being 'faithful'

As dusk fell behind the skyscrapers of Hong Kong Island, lights twinkled along its skyline. As music invaded the air, punctuated by coloured laser patterns, the buildings of steel and glass swayed, moved, rose and fell as if in a choreographed piece. The brawny HSBC building orchestrated the rhythms that were sinuously picked up by Bank of China and then twirled in the colours that descended into the waters of the bay. The entire architecture danced, rising slowly to a crescendo. At the end, the awed audience in Kowloon applauded in exhilaration. This is not a figment of the imagination but a daily occurrence in the island city &mdash; the Symphony of Lights, a 14-minute long permanent laser show that plays over the forest of skyscrapers along Hong Kong&rsquo;s Victoria Harbour.

When buildings dance 

Our prime minister recently described Pakistan Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani as a &ldquo;man of peace&rdquo;. The prime minister may be justified in his assessment; after all he has met Mr Gilani rather more often than you or I. But it is not Mr Gilani&rsquo;s pacific nature that is important &mdash; but rather his will and capacity to deliver peace.

Uday Abhyankar: For India, a year of talking to Gilani, but with eyes on Kayani

The regulator is the state-appointed protector of the interest of those receiving the establishment&rsquo;s care.

AMRI disaster: An expose of regulations

One particular journalistic clich&eacute; one always read on the sports pages in the &lsquo;80s was: &ldquo;India manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.&rdquo;&nbsp;Then, it used to be about our cricket team&rsquo;s fortunes against Pakistan in Sharjah.&nbsp;Today, it would aptly fit the performance of our economic and regulatory policy, its authors and administrators.

FDI policy makes messy entry into new year

Exemptions for not using power in manufacturing operations always creates problems of interpretation. Judging by the number if judgments and even Supreme Court judgments on the subject, it must be regarded as one of the most complicated subjects. The idea of charging lower duty for hand made goods is to encourage labour intensive activities where generation of employment is an important consideration. Examples are manufacture of biri, cheap shoes, chappals, soap, fireworks etc. However somewhere or other such activities use power such as for lighting the working place or pump water for mixing in the raw material etc. Sometimes in packing biri power is used for sealing the plastic bag. So controversies are galore on an apparently simple issue. And even the latest Supreme Court judgment on the issue in the case of CCE v Gurukripa Resins P Ltd, 2011 (270) ELT 3 (SC), has not settled the issue.

Duty difference for using power in manufacture should be abolished in this budget

The Supreme Court last week set aside the judgment of the Calcutta high court which had upheld the acquisition of several floors of a building in Kolkata occupied by certain companies. The West Bengal government earlier requisitioned the floors but at the end of the 25-year period, notified the property for acquisition for &ldquo;public purpose&rdquo;, namely for permanent office accommodation of the Public Works Department. This was opposed by the owners. However, they were not given a proper hearing and the property was acquired. When the government action was challenged in the high court, both the single judge and the division bench dismissed the petition. In the appeal before the Supreme Court, it was argued that the right to raise objections and being heard was not an empty formality and have been raised to the level of a fundamental right by the court.

Kolkata multi-storied building 

Export to Nepal would be on par with that to other countries with effect from March 1 for the purpose of removal without payment of excise duty or for removal under claim of rebate of excise duty or for procurement of inputs required for the purpose.

Differential export rule ends for Nepal

The new Bill will set back the cause of food security - while wrecking central finances.

Not a grain of sense

Lessons from the Iraq war, a bloody and comprehensive foreign-policy failure.

An untidy freedom

European policymakers like to extol the strength of the euro zone: relative to the United States, it has a much lower fiscal deficit (four per cent of GDP, compared to almost 10 per cent for the US). Moreover, unlike the US, the euro zone does not have an external deficit, which means that the monetary union holds enough savings to finance all of its members&rsquo; budget deficits and resolve their debt problems.

Daniel Gros: Europe, heal thyself

There will be more pay revenues, less carriage fees, more choice and so on. These are the results the amendment, rightly, seeks. There is, however, a lot of subtext.

Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: Get ready for the network slugfest

Except for the books, they had little in common. The writers and book lovers who died in 2011 spanned worlds of experience, from Diana Wynne Jones, who survived a horrifying childhood to become a writer of children&rsquo;s books, to Vaclav Havel, the playwright who ushered his country safely into revolution and beyond. This column pays tribute to some of the best.

Nilanjana S Roy: So long, and thanks for all the fish

As the year draws to a close and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh completes yet another of his foreign visits, it is perhaps time to reflect on how peripatetic India&rsquo;s head of government has been in a year he was under unprecedented political pressure at home.

A K Bhattacharya: The PM's 'foreign hand'

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