You need to be more cautious because of the quirks of the industrial production index.

Investing on the basis of IIP?

Business Standard

The most watched sporting event of the year played out last weekend, and as a dutiful media consumer, I made it a point to watch it with several friends in a crowded neighbourhood sports bar. It was the finals of the World Cup of football (or soccer, as they call it in these parts), and I sat through 120 excruciating minutes of some of the worst bare-knuckled, ill-tempered, fouls-littered football I have ever been unfortunate enough to witness.

The beautiful game

Last month, a young friend from a leading television channel alerted me on the National Litigation Policy Document release. Caught up as I was in the Bhopal case decision and the GoM aftermath, that I put it on the backburner. But, its never too late to write about reforms which are aimed at reducing in average pendency time of cases from fifteen to three years.

Litigation policy: Unless pursued on a war footing, it may remain stillborn

The Government of India announced a &ldquo;National Litigation Policy&rdquo; last month, holding out a promise to reduce the tenure of pendency of court cases from an average of fifteen years to three years. The key focus of this policy appears to be &ldquo;to reduce Government litigation in courts so that valuable court time would be spent in resolving other pending cases&rdquo;.

Policy merely shows a good intent

The Supreme Court ruled last week that the Andhra Pradesh Electricity Regulatory Commission can fix the tariffs for non-conventional energy produced by private &lsquo;green&rsquo; companies. The court stated in a large batch of appeals that the commission has the jurisdiction to determine tariff &ldquo;which take within its ambit the &#39;purchase price' for procurement of the electricity generated by the non-conventional energy developers/ generators.

AP power commission set to rework tariff for green firms

This has been the sub-ject matter of several Supreme Court and Tribunal judgements and the issue is quite well settled. Even then one of the latest Tribunal judgements (CCE, vs Super Music International &mdash; 2009(164)ECR 0224 (Tri.- Delhi) shows that the Revenue has been filing revisions in the Higher Appellate Authorities without any regard for several Supreme Court judgements and Board's own circular and even applying a Rule of the Central Excise Credit Rules 2004 ina-dequately.

Cenvat must provide for intermediate goods

When the Reddy brothers, accused of illegal mining, demonstrate their grip over a state government, most people will rightly bemoan the role that corruption plays in public life. However, vital as it is to tackle the issue, it is also important to view it in perspective. Most people would not have realised, for instance, that India has been improving on at least one corruption score. Transparency International, the Berlin-based body, has been surveying international businessmen on their perceptions of corruption in different countries since 1995. In the latest ranking, for 2009, India occupied the 84th spot in a list of 180 countries, with an absolute index of 3.4 (any score under 5 is considered a poor show). But five years earlier, in 2004, India scored 90th in a smaller list of 146 countries, with an absolute index of 2.8. On both absolute and relative scales, perceptions about the levels of corruption in India have improved.

Worse, but also better

The government has said that it is willing to relax some controls on the sugar industry, which, however, has given a guarded response, leaving the canvas obscure. What seems clear is that neither the government nor the industry is prepared for total deregulation. So, even as the Food and Agriculture Minister, Sharad Pawar, announced that the government would consider decontrolling sugar, he made it clear that the right to fix sugarcane prices would remain with state governments. If that is so, the proposed decontrol would involve only one or two things: ending the sugar release mechanism and perhaps also scrapping or reducing the levy on sugar. In effect, the fate of both cane farmers and the sugar industry would remain in the hands of governments.

Limited partnership

The Indian rupee&rsquo;s new symbol, an elegant, simple and brilliant combination of Sanskrit Ra and the English R without the stem, deserved a more dignified debut. A minister holding up an A4-size sheet of paper for cameras sitting at her desk? No fancy unveiling, no fireworks or music, no celebrations at all? How unfortunate. How inelegant. How crass.

Sanjaya Baru: Rupee reborn


Over the past several years, each time anyone has questioned any infrastructure project being built (the post-Nehru temples of India!), the dominant reaction in certain circles has uniformly been the same: Is it more important to save some money or is it more important to get projects on the ground? Sure, there was a lot less scandal in the days the Airports Authority of India was in charge, the argument goes, but look at how poor the quality of airports was and how small their capacity;

Sunil Jain: The great highway robbery

The recent debate over the freedom of financial regulators from netas and babus needs to be looked at in the context of the remarkable immunity from accountability that the latter enjoy &mdash; even from the media. Take, for instance, accountability of the bureaucrats whose actions, or inactions, surely contributed to the Bhopal tragedy &mdash; these would include the factory inspectors; those supposed to be monitoring hazardous chemicals business and ensuring that safety regulations were rigidly followed, to prevent such terrible tragedies; those who allowed the land surrounding the factory, which was supposed to remain vacant, to be occupied illegally, etc.

A V Rajwade: The neta-babu raj 

The surest sign that the global economy, particularly the developed countries, is far from getting back to normal lies in the results of India&rsquo;s software leaders, TCS and Infosys, for the first quarter of the current financial year. It is not as if the storm of the last year is still there and the hatches remain battened down, but it is not calm seas and sunny sailing yet. The good news is that a certain amount of discretionary spending is back, the not-so-good news is that prices are either stable or under pressure, depending on who you are, and the bad news is that the inexorable need to recruit in order to deliver growth and volumes has resulted in higher attrition even as wage bills have gone up.

Software struggles on

A few weeks ago, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) looked like it was finally emerging as a meaningful opposition party, seeking to forge an alliance with the Left on &ldquo;secular&rdquo; and national issues of concern to the common man like inflation and national security. Today the party is scrambling for cover on its biggest planks, corruption and terror. Just one television channel broadcasting news of the involvement of Hindu groups in terror attacks got RSS goons to vandalise the television station, making it clear that the Sangh Parivar remains as closed to any form of scrutiny on the issue of Hindu groups being involved in such terror &mdash; and the issues of encounter killings and the Best Bakery in Gujarat are waiting to erupt. As for corruption, the party had to face the ignominy of the Lokayukta, Justice Santosh Hegde, resigning due to the Karnataka government&rsquo;s refusal to act on his report last year on the mining scandal that continues to rock the state.

Mining corruption

Europe continues to constitute the epicentre of Act II of the global financial crisis, which has now mutated into a sovereign-debt crisis within the eurozone.

Daniel Gros: Europe's Banks, Europe's crisis

The Indian media and entertainment space is booming. There are lots of growth opportunities in print, TV, films, mobile, the Net, et al. And Indian media companies are diversifying into other areas successfully.

Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: Why can't media companies diversify?

The definition of South Asia is not permanently fixed,&rdquo; publisher and writer Urvashi Butalia observed recently. Neither, by implication, is the definition of what puts India in the term &ldquo;Indian writing&rdquo;, and in different ways, three separate Indian/Asian prizes are looking for new ways to populate the shelf of South Asian literature.

Nilanjana S Roy: Putting the Asian into Asian fiction

The last fortnight has seen a new face of India&rsquo;s financial sector regulators. All of a sudden, all of them look like tigers. No longer do they appear subservient to all the wishes of the finance minister or the ministry mandarins.

A K Bhattacharya: Regulatory spine, at last

Basic acquaintance with law and access to legal information have become indispensable to everyone these days, but no species of knowledge is more difficult to get at the desired moment. It is still a sealed book and patrimony of the legal profession. The courts are the least accessible of all branches of government. The situation has changed little even after computerisation of courts more than a decade ago.

M J Antony: Hung on cyber front

While developing a methodology to work out pricing structures for various procedures is critical to avoid price gouging by some hospitals, insurance firms need to look at solutions like co-payment to help reduce their rising losses.

Are private hospitals ripping off customers?

The report of the Takeover Regulations Advisory Committee (TRAC) deserves to be commended on several counts. First, it is an endeavour to deal with the complex subject of acquisition of shares for substantial control and takeovers on a much more mature footing than the regulations currently in place do.

Gentlemen at the gate

The Government of India&rsquo;s initiative to focus on agricultural development in the eastern states, as represented by the meeting that the Union ministers for finance and agriculture attended in Kolkata last week, is welcome if belated. Some may see this as a pre-election gimmick with an eye to elections in Bihar and Bengal. But there is no gainsaying the fact that the region&rsquo;s agricultural economy needs a productivity boost. Among the ideas mooted, a task force is to be set up to ensure speedy popularisation of hybrid rice in the same way as has been done in China where over 60 per cent of the total land under rice now grows hybrid rice. While the talk of a &ldquo;second green revolution&rdquo; in eastern India has been heard for a long time, the recent spike in food prices, due largely to supply-side constraints, seems to have stirred activity in New Delhi.

Hybrid hopes

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