There was a time when the price of almost every commodity was controlled. It was during the Second World War. When India&rsquo;s post-Independence growth outpaced domestic supply of goods in the 1950s, free India&rsquo;s policymakers drew on the experience of the war years to introduce rationing and price-controls. For half a century after that, price and distribution controls became, on the one hand, the symbol of Indian socialism and, on the other, the weaponry of a corrupt &ldquo;licence-permit Raj&rdquo;. Then came the plea for a &ldquo;bonfire of controls&rdquo; and in that early dawn of liberalisation, price controls on commodities like steel and cement disappeared. Few in today&rsquo;s India can even imagine the control and permit Raj that defined cement sales and pricing barely a generation ago. The only really &ldquo;non-essential&rdquo; commodity to survive the era of liberalisation is sugar.

Sugar free

Business Standard

With the momentum of the past few years, India&rsquo;s potential for growth is enormous, despite the chaotic loose linkages. In sectors like power and telecommunications, this translates to demand far outstripping capacity. Some contend that domestic inability to build capacity &mdash; i.e., being able to actually pull it off, as against the perpetual potential &mdash; will conscribe not only these sectors, but also limit overall growth. So the argument goes, e.g.

Shyam Ponappa: China Club instead of Bombay Club?

Last fortnight, I asked: Is India rich enough to pay for the cost of transition to a low-carbon economy? I asked this in the context of the current moves in international climate-change negotiations, which demand that countries like India, till now seen as victims of the carbon excesses of the industrialised countries, must take full responsibility to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions.

Sunita Narain: No cheap solutions

Even before Justice Sarosh Homi Kapadia takes over as the country&rsquo;s new chief justice next week, he has a crowded calendar. There is the issue of the overwhelming, and rapidly increasing, backlog of cases. In the Supreme Court, it rose from 49,819 last year to 55,971 now; in the high courts, it has risen from 38,34,224 to 40,49,649; and from 264,22,920 to 272,38,782 in the case of district and subordinate courts. While a large part of this is due to the fact that India has a lot less judges than other countries have (India has roughly 12 judges per million population versus 110 in the US), even the sanctioned posts are not being filled.

Heavy caseload

A quick glance at the headline numbers for the fourth quarter (Q4) results suggests that India Inc is back on the fast-growth track, just as the pundits and politicians had forecast. However, the devil &mdash; and one that is likely to keep CEOs awake at night &mdash; is in the detail. Certainly, top-line growth confirms that after a two-quarter hiatus, demand is back with a bang, continuing a trend that began in Q3, especially when automobile companies displayed sales numbers that surprised analysts and themselves. Business Standard Research Bureau calculations show that net sales of 741 manufacturing and services companies that have declared their Q4 results for 2009-2010 so far grew a healthy 40.51 per cent in January to March over the same period in the last fiscal.

The cost of growth

Will IPL survive the exit of Lalit Modi?&rdquo; IPL is a concoction of some of the biggest religions and crazes of the Indian public &mdash; cricket, films, glamour and time pass. It has the support of some strong business houses through both franchisees and sponsors; is packed with star cricket players &mdash; domestic and international &mdash; and has the glitz of film stars and is now a big TV event.

Madhukar Sabnavis: Brands need a face

The news is that Malvinder Singh is relocating to Singapore. Fortis, the health-care company he owns with younger brother Shivinder, had recently bought Parkway Hospitals of Singapore for over $650 million. This was a company the Singhs had coveted for several years.

Bhupesh Bhandari: Bye-bye India

I was at an entrepreneurship workshop conducted by Peter B Zaboji. Peter was a professor at Insead and a corporate restructuring expert. Peter&rsquo;s aim was to implant the entrepreneurship fire in his audience and assist entrepreneurs with a road map to tap private equity. Peter came with an elite list of speakers, including Piroska Zoli (a silicon entrepreneur) and Imre Hild (a financial innovator from Hungary). I could relate to Imre&rsquo;s idea. He found an opportunity in selling LARE (Life Annuity for Real Estate) to a select Hungarian audience. Imre saw a need for a financial instrument for war widows who had no one to hand over their real estate assets and, so, needed to commoditise these in their life. The widows would sell their land to the bank for a fixed annuity. This put Imre on the list of successful financial innovators in the region.

Capitalism: A zero-sum game

Time and again, people around the world have partially or fully disrobed in protest.

Underexposure

Trust nobody when they say they can tell you about India. Unless the teller is a storyteller, and can offer you an essence distilled into a myth. When the subject is so oceanic in scale, nothing factual is going to be adequate and only the purely fictional can be entirely true.

Lost on the river

The recent announcement by Sports Minister M S Gill on the tenure of sports administrators has generated a controversy. The facts do not justify the reaction. The reality is as follows: the terms of sports administrators have been reduced to a maximum of 12 years.

Surjit S Bhalla: Follow the money

My computer assembler, Viresh, is a permanent resident of Almora. This doesn&rsquo;t mean he lives there. His parents do. He migrated as a teenager to Delhi in 1993, and 11 months in a year, he operates out of a cubbyhole in Nehru Place. He lives in a rented apartment in Kalkaji.

Devangshu Datta: Getting over an identity crisis

If you have the money and the inclination, you can have homes in not one but several cities.

Subir Roy: A tale of two cities

Indians are suspicious of all soups except Hot &amp; Sour, and Tom Yam.

Hot days, cold soup

Bhutan is forever making history. It&rsquo;s latest achievement is to inspire Joseph Stiglitz&rsquo;s enthusiasm for the gross national happiness (GNH) concept that the fourth monarch, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, coined to indicate that the nation&rsquo;s highest goal is the people&rsquo;s satisfaction and well-being rather than just an increased gross domestic product (GDP).

Sunanda K Datta-Ray: Malls, not monasteries

Much like the passage of the four seasons, the south-west monsoon arrives with unfailing regularity. But the amount of rainfall and its spread over time and geographical space rarely conform to the predictions of the weatherman. The prospect that this year&rsquo;s rains will be normal is music to the ears of the UPA government that is worried stiff over double-digit food inflation.

N Chandra Mohan: Prepare for a wayward monsoon

Delhi&rsquo;s roads are capable of springing all sorts of surprises, I know. Even so, what we saw the other day was definitely in the realm of the unexpected. There we were, sailing down Africa Avenue, when ahead of us, a strange white thing on wheels braked before a red light. &ldquo;Is it a toy elephant?&rdquo; asked my daughter looking at its rotund backside. &ldquo;Or a pig, maybe?&rdquo; suggested my son, his eyes on its thin tail. &ldquo;No!&rdquo; they both cried in unison as we drew up alongside, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a white rat with Ganeshji riding it!&rdquo; And so it was &mdash; a large rodent on wheels with a life-size statue of the elephant-headed god of good beginnings. The statue was garlanded with fresh flowers, spewing flower petals from its right hand, and holding a crazily spinning &lt;I&gt;chakra (wheel) &lt;/I&gt;in the left.

Geetanjali Krishna: Gods on Delhi roads

It&rsquo;s not that she&rsquo;s an insomniac but my wife has odd habits that include getting up in the middle of the night to potter around, at which time she thinks it&rsquo;s normal to wake up anyone for a conversation. Sometimes, if I&rsquo;m lucky, she&rsquo;ll call up her brother to discuss the day&rsquo;s news, or exchange views on the perils of parenthood, or relish a particularly nasty piece of gossip. At other times, she&rsquo;ll shake me awake to ask if I&rsquo;ve signed the utility cheques, or to share some neighbourhood scandal.

Kishore Singh: Too dim to be asleep

In March this year, Spain had a AA+ foreign credit rating from Standard and Poor&rsquo;s (S&amp;P), signalling &ldquo;very strong capacity&rdquo; to meet its financial obligations. Portugal and Italy were at A+ (&ldquo;strong capacity&rdquo; to meet financial commitments). A year ago, Greece was there too. Southern Europe&rsquo;s &ldquo;Pigs&rdquo; countries, as they are called, have a different story to tell today. Greece has been pushed down rapidly to junk bond status.

T N Ninan: And Pigs do fly

God certainly works in mysterious ways for some people.

Bringing up Crazy

The fourth quarter results of 2009-10 have confirmed several trends visible in Q3. Earnings continued to grow quickly year-on-year but less quickly than in Q3.&nbsp; Raw material input costs rose as commodity markets rebounded through January-March 2010. Inflation also caused upwards pressure in rates.

Don't be overweight on stocks

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