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

Business Standard

Sir, the first point that I would like to bring to the Finance Minister's notice is a caution that we need to exercise in view of the likely contingent effect of what is happening in the rest of the world. I think he is sagacious enough to move to a path of fiscal consolidation.

'Global confidence is being shaken up once again'

Do children love school? Not many do. They are sentenced to 15 years of force-feeding which makes them suitable to be cogs in the wheel of the social/industrial system.

Sreelatha Menon: The teaching table

The popular reaction of relief and celebration to the verdict of a special court in Mumbai sentencing Mohammad Ajmal Kasab, the Pakistani national involved in the dastardly terror attack in Mumbai on 26th November 2008, to death is understandable. The people of India have felt helpless in the face of such terrorist attacks and they see in the death penalty justice being done.

Punishment and remorse

The debates in the two Houses of Parliament last month on the Dantewada massacre highlighted why Maoism is likely to persist in India much longer than anticipated by the apolitical sections of the Indian security establishment. It was clear from the debate that many political parties still look at Maoism in terms of electoral vote-bank politics.

K Subrahmanyam: The dangers of playing footsie with Maoists

The economic adjustment programme agreed last weekend between Europe, the International Monetary Fund and Greece will be considered, and approved, by the IMF&rsquo;s executive board soon. Early satisfaction with the programme has given way to serious market doubts about it. These doubts are rational because the fiscal arithmetic simply does not work.

Arvind Subramanian: The IMF, Greece, and 'immoral hazard'

Information provided in financial statements is used to value the entity&rsquo;s equity capital. It is also used to evaluate the performance of the management in its stewardship function. &lsquo;Decision usefulness&rsquo; is the overriding principle in the preparation and presentation of financial statements. The principle of decision usefulness is applied in formulating accounting standards, subject to the principle of prudence and the overall constraints of &lsquo;costs and benefits&rsquo; and timeliness. An entity formulates accounting policy consistent with the principles and methods stipulated in accounting standards.

Fixed Assets: A matter of Accounting Choice

Family businesses constitute most businesses in India as anywhere else in the world. With economic liberalisation and industrial expansion, family businesses have had to evolve or otherwise dwindle, depending on capabilities and resources. And in cases of discord within the family, litigation is inevitable, whether of the sophisticated non-adversarial type of the Shriram group trifurcation, or the bitterly contested court battles of Ranbaxy and the Modi group in the last century. But in the recent Ambani brothers&rsquo; case it has assumed a different dimension, involving constitutional rights of the nation and its people.

SC should have effected closure to Ambanis' case

Defining goods was not the order of the day earlier in the Tariffs of Central Excise and Customs. There were far too many controversies at that time regarding the identity of goods for classification. Rubber, resin, cotton fabrics, steel bars, rods, grease proof paper and various such items generated court cases. It was realised that defining goods (and even artificially) would solve problems. It did. But now the trend has become too often to give artificial definition by incorporating deeming clause through the word &lsquo;includes&rsquo;. The concept of &lsquo;manufacture&rsquo; which is fundamental in central excise is inclusive. Section 2(f) of the Excise Act says manufacture includes any process, - (i), (ii), (iii). In Chapter 39 for plastics in the sub-heading note-2 plasticiser includes secondary plasticiser. There are umpteen such inclusive definitions in excise.

How expansive can an inclusive definition be

The law on nomination of shares held in companies has taken a new meaning with perhaps the first interpretation of the provisions governing nomination in the Companies Act, 1956 by the Bombay high court.

'Nominee of shares superior to legal heirs'

If India is to carry on with caste-based reservations, the argument goes, what&rsquo;s wrong with the argument for having a caste-based census as demanded by Lalu Prasad and Mulayam Singh Yadav? The current method of figuring out the country&rsquo;s caste composition is based on a five-yearly sample by the National Sample Survey (NSS), and the numbers have varied quite a lot between the last two surveys. Many argue the new numbers are an overstatement &mdash; a census, by this logic, will separate the wheat from the chaff, and you&rsquo;ll know just how many people there are in various caste groups. That may well be the case, those opposed to caste-census like Home Minister P Chidambaram argue that there are huge difficulties associated with a caste-census. For one, there are supposed to be around 18,000-odd caste groups.

Caste in confusion

Most Britons deeply rue the fact that they are headed for a coalition government, with many predicting various dire outcomes like a downward spiral into a Greece-like economic crisis and sundry political disasters. History suggests that they shouldn&rsquo;t be so apprehensive. Since the end of World War II, most of Europe&rsquo;s major economies have been governed by coalitions &mdash; Germany, Spain, Belgium, Italy, France, the Netherlands and Ireland to name a few &mdash; with no noticeable harm in the quality of governance. Yet, even as the British intelligentsia is veering round to acceptance &mdash; and urgently urging government formation to stave off a market crash in the face of a rating downgrade threat &mdash; many Britons view the prospect of a Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition with distaste and alarm. Certainly, given the polarity of outlook between the two parties and personalities concerned, the nightmare of a non-performing government appears strong.

Rue Britannia

What is at the heart of the Greek crisis? What are the important lessons for India? Based on a fairly close reading of the international press, it has been surprisingly hard to answer the first of these questions, in a way that helps address the second.

Suman Bery: Greek lessons for India

The 2010 Budget session of Parliament ended last Friday. The Budget session is usually the longest and this one started on February 22 and ended on May 7, with a short four-week break in between. An assessment of what the two Houses of Parliament achieved during the Budget session is, therefore, a good indicator of how effective the government was in pushing its legislative agenda for the year.

A K Bhattacharya: Parliamentary paralysis

Indian language print is the new growth story in the $17-billion Indian media and entertainment industry. In December 2009, DB Corporation, the publishers of Dainik Bhaskar, raised Rs 450 crore through an initial public offer (IPO). Later, in April 2010, Blackstone, a private equity fund, picked up an undisclosed stake in Jagran Prakashan, publishers of Dainik Jagran, for Rs 225 crore. Earlier this month, Jagran bought Mid-Day in a share-swap deal.

Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: The punting on small-town media

As Tagore&rsquo;s 150th birth anniversary became a trending topic on Twitter, the social media site, it seemed like a good time to ask which Tagore we were celebrating. (Sticklers will point out that we&rsquo;re celebrating a year early &mdash; technically, the Nobel Prize-winning poet and prolific writer would have turned 149, not 150, today. Try telling them that in Shantiniketan.

Nilanjana S Roy: The unread Tagore

The sharp rise on Monday was operator-driven and appeared to be a correction in a strong downtrend. Volumes were good in cash and excellent in derivatives. Net institutional contribution was very low, albeit positive. Both stock futures and Nifty futures open interest (OI) dropped. &lsquo;Derivatives shorters&rsquo; were squeezed out as the market opened high on Monday.

Another downtrend likely this week

Should long-term investors try to time entries and exits? Even in an idealised case, where two people make exactly the same decisions buying and selling the same stock on the same day, very different returns can result.

Does timing the markets yield better returns?

Barely a month ago, on the 10th of April to be precise, the cabinet secretary of the Government of India wrote a letter to all the members of the Union Council of Ministers, letting them know that the prime minister would like them not to go beyond their brief in interacting with the media. The letter was quite categorical. The cabinet secretary conveyed &ldquo;the decision of prime minister that in respect of issues considered to be sensitive by him, one ministry/department will be designated as the nodal ministry/department as a single point for interaction with the media and accurate articulation of the actions taken/being contemplated by government as well as the stance adopted by government&rdquo; (underlined in the original).

Loose cannons

Bizarre are the ways of the government when it comes to managing, or mismanaging, the country&rsquo;s food economy. On the one hand, it goes on mopping up bulk of the wheat and rice arriving in the mandis to build up its grain stocks, clearly to prevent foodgrain prices from falling below the minimum support price (MSP) level. On the other hand, it plans to offload 3 million tonnes of wheat and rice, in addition to the normal supplies from the public distribution system (PDS), to slash its overflowing grain stocks and bring down grain prices. This is not only bad management but also bad economics. The empowered group of ministers, which has taken this decision, has pegged the sale price of wheat at Rs 8.42 a kg, nearly half of the actual economic cost (procurement cost plus overheads) of around Rs 16 a kg. Similarly, rice is to be sold at Rs 11.85 a kg, against its effective economic cost of around Rs 19 a kg.

Mismanaging food

Around the world, universities are the stuff that makes great cities. Imagine Boston without Harvard, MIT and the myriad other institutions that are clustered around the Boston-Cambridge area. In Britain, Oxford and Cambridge are vibrant urban centres that derive their vigour almost entirely from playing host to famous universities. Even large and diversified global cities like London and New York would be much diminished without the intellectual clustering of LSE, Columbia, UCL and NYU. In each case, the universities are an integral part of the urban landscape and are consciously leveraged by their host cities.

Sanjeev Sanyal: Building Bostons, not Kanpurs

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