Important signals on the government&rsquo;s economic policy imperatives and priorities have emerged from the macro-economic framework the Planning Commission has outlined for the Twelfth Five Year Plan starting next April. These indicate that our planners have already acknowledged the unlikelihood of any major step-up in the speed of policy change in the coming few years.

A K Bhattacharya: Marking time on reforms

Business Standard

One of the world&rsquo;s most powerful women on fate and hard work &mdash; the cornerstones of her career in the banking world.

Lunch with BS: Chanda Kochhar

The Nifty failed to cross the resistance at 5,175, falling back in a sharp sell-off yesterday. The pattern suggests last week&rsquo;s uptrend was over, since key short-term indicators went into sell mode. There was a fair amount of institutional selling, especially by FIIs, on Monday.

Nifty may retrace 4,700 levels

The industrial production numbers for July confirm the slowdown in tempo, with the month&rsquo;s growth in output at 3.3 per cent being the slowest in two years. Growth during April-July has averaged a sub-par 5.8 per cent.

Tougher choices for RBI

Amidst the avalanche of words that marked the 10th anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York, only a few commentators have looked at the power shift that has occurred in the world since that epochal event. At the time of the Al Qaeda attack, the United States reigned unchallenged and supreme. Once the wars began in Afghanistan and Iraq, there were articles in Foreign Affairs asking why there should not be a new American imperium. Now, the uni-polar moment that provoked such hubris has not only passed, but Samuel Huntington&rsquo;s thesis on the clash of civilisations also seems to have been somewhat closer to the mark than the even more simplistic thesis on the &ldquo;end of history&rdquo; argued by Francis Fukuyama. Looking back, 2001-2011 looks like a lost decade for the United States.

A lost decade

Following the torpor of the August holidays on both sides of the Atlantic, each September marks the revival of the international diplomatic calendar. On the political side, the centrepiece is the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in New York; on the economic side, a similar marker is the Annual Meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, held in Washington twice every three years.

Suman Bery: Hindi-Chini buy buy

Moralists condemn recreational gamblings though it is a very popular activity. However, an understanding of gambling games can help every investor or trader. Any gambling game has certain basic principles.

Focus on improving the risk:reward ratio

Of the scandals that have visited the United Progressive Alliance government lately, perhaps the most damaging is the report by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) on the way state-owned Air India has been run into the ground. Damaging, not because of the actual financial loss but because it exposes the system.

Subir Roy: Story of a slow death retold

All judges had a past as lawyers, and all lawyers could have a future as judges. They know the system from inside, warts and all. Therefore, when judges disclose some of the manoeuvres adopted by the legal profession that cause delays in dispensing justice, ordinary people must listen. This rare occasion arose in two recent cases in the Supreme Court, one of which started in 1977 in the Delhi High Court.

M J Antony: From here to uncertainty

Another hike will impede India&rsquo;s growth story, but inflationary impulses in the system still need attention.

Time for RBI to press pause?

Better late than never, it is said. This adage applies aptly to the government&rsquo;s belated decision to lift the four-year-old bar on the export of wheat and non-basmati rice, as also to remove the cap on the export of cotton. However, the government has put brakes on the export of onions, following a price surge in recent weeks. The export ban last week has paid immediate dividends as onion prices have dropped. But as might be expected, the move has provoked criticism from farmers, traders and politicians in Maharashtra, the key onion-producing state &mdash; underlining once again that farmers&rsquo; interests are usually sacrificed in order to protect consumers.

Opening the agri-exports door...

The recent estimates by the Central Statistical Organisation (CSO), on both the Index of Industrial Production (IIP) and gross domestic product (GDP), show a slowdown; by how much, remains a matter of conjecture. For CSO has not only come up with the latest quarterly estimates, but it has also changed the estimates for the corresponding quarter of the previous year. While doing so, it has strangely not released the revised data of the intervening quarters. And the fact that IIP continues to vary widely, and is subject to sharp corrections, is well known. For analysts, the latest data are without a comparable historical perspective, and therefore of limited use.

Missing data

In the second half of August the nation witnessed a struggle between constitutional propriety and populist democracy. Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar had anticipated this. On November 25, 1949, when he introduced the final version of the Constitution for adoption, his speech included three warnings about the threat to democracy in India.

Nitin Desai: Let's rescue the republic

The meeting was in the same city and not very far from the fervid, dusty Ramlila grounds where Baburao Hazare was gamely in the throes of an anti-corruption fast that convulsed the government, Parliament and the TV news channels.

Kanika Datta: Two-speed India

The world Trade Organisation (WTO) Director General Pascal Lamy confirmed last week at New Delhi that the Doha Round was not moving ahead and if something drastic is not achieved, the multilateral process of trade liberalisation will continue to remain under pressure.

T S Vishwanath: Doha, one step at a time

The proposition that urban growth has not decelerated during 2001-11 is tenuous since most cities have recorded a significant decline in their population growth.

Amitabh Kundu & Debolina Kundu: India's 'urban' legend

The government has finalised the draft of the Biotechnology Regulatory Authority of India (BRAI) Bill. A close reading of the draft shows that, on the one hand, this Bill intends to provide single-window clearance to genetically-modified (GM) crops promoted by multinational seed companies; on the other, it ignores the possible risks and threats to our agriculture, health and environment from this controversial technology.

Raghuvansh Prasad Singh: BRAI Bill - Bulldozing public opinion

I&rsquo;d no idea that finding a place to stay would be so difficult in Delhi,&rdquo; Ramesh said gloomily, as he once again asked his employer for some extra time off. He had brought his wife, mother and two children from their village in Kumaon recently, but had been unable to find a place to stay. &ldquo;The schools in my village are just not good enough, so we decided to bring the children here to study. But I&rsquo;d not realised that in this crazy city, getting a decent room at a decent price would be so difficult!&rdquo; he said. It wasn&rsquo;t that his needs were unrealistic. &ldquo;We&rsquo;re a family of five, all I wanted was a clean room with a bathroom,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I thought that for a monthly rent of about Rs 2,500, I&rsquo;d be able to find something suitable.&rdquo; Ramesh got his first shock when he went house-hunting in the unauthorised settlement near Hauz Khas Village.

Geetanjali Krishna: Ramesh's house-hunting

I&rsquo;m not normally given to complaining but when it appeared that my wife was leading a secret life, I couldn&rsquo;t help wondering what was up. In the morning, barely done with her yoga, she&rsquo;d rush to shower and be out, declaring only that she was &ldquo;meeting a friend&rdquo;, or catching a movie on a &ldquo;morning show&rdquo;. Fortunately, morning shows no longer show sleazy movies that once characterised cinema halls, but Friends with Benefits didn&rsquo;t augur too well for a family reconciled to friends without those benefits.

Kishore Singh: The company of women

On Thursday, the minister for industry and commerce took his proposal on a new manufacturing policy to Cabinet. Some of his ministerial colleagues objected to its contents, so the already-delayed draft policy will be in limbo for a while longer. Earlier, the sports minister took to Cabinet his proposals on sports administration, only for half a dozen ministers to shoot it down; the sports minister will now figure out how he should revise his proposals.

T N Ninan: More indecision

In an earlier column I had outlined two alternative theories about global warming: the CO2 theory propagated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark&rsquo;s &ldquo;cosmoclimatology&rdquo; theory which linked &ldquo;sunspots&rdquo; and cosmic rays to the Earth&rsquo;s climate (&ldquo;Climate change: sun and the stars vs CO2&rdquo;, June 2007). I had also noted that an experiment at the CERN particle physics laboratory called CLOUD was to begin in 2010 to test the cosmoclimatology theory. The first results from this experiment were published recently (&ldquo;Role of sulphuric acid, ammonia and galactic cosmic rays in atmospheric aerosol nucleation&rdquo;, by Kirby et al, Nature (2011), 476, 429-433). It finds a &ldquo;significant&rdquo; cosmic ray cloud effect (see www.thegwpf.org for details and commentaries including from Professor Svensmark).

Deepak Lal: Clouds of climate change

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