After getting tough on air pollution, the government is now focusing on noise and water pollution. This must be welcomed. The Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) has expressed its intention to install noise governors on instruments and equipment that multiply sound to reduce noise pollution. Like the speed governors in vehicles, noise governors embedded in instruments that create noise can help keep the sound level within permissible limits. As a follow-up measure, the CPCB plans to manage the national ambient noise monitoring network being set up by the environment ministry. This infrastructure, meant for noise mapping of the country, is expected to be in place in about five years. Curbing noise pollution has gained urgency with increasing evidence that in densely populated urban areas, noise levels have crossed the 80 decibel (db) threshold level beyond which noise becomes physically hurtful and harmful.

The other pollutants

Business Standard

SMEs are still a small part of the organised Indian advertising market.

Madhukar Sabnavis: Is Advertising only for the big boys?

US President Barack Obama&rsquo;s blast across the mainsails of the financial sector is being widely described as a populist move in an attempt to regain the political initiative after the Democrats&rsquo; loss of their super-majority in the Senate as a result of the Massachusetts election.

Jamal Mecklai: American breakfast

Jobs are back, finally. And the optimism is visible not only at the Indian Institute of Management campuses, but also at the offices of your friendly neighbourhood placement agencies. Everyone seems to be back in hiring mode &mdash; companies across sectors, led this time by infrastructure, construction and equipment industries (termed the new ICE by Stanton Chase MD R Suresh), are filling up vacancies.

Shyamal Majumdar: Reality check on jobs

State-owned banks have been the unfashionable cousins in the banking business for the last 40 years. Initially, it was the foreign banks that set the pace &mdash; with better growth rates, superior profit numbers, and leadership in innovations. The foreign banks routinely bagged the best corporate customers and the fattest individual accounts. When new private, Indian banks set up shop, leadership passed to ICICI Bank for setting the pace, and HDFC Bank for quality benchmarks.

T N Ninan: SOBs' turn to smile

Sometime back, I had drawn a parallel between Alvin Toffler&rsquo;s The Third Wave (1980) and wine in India. The pioneers (Indage, Grover, and Sula) had set up the &ldquo;First Wave&rdquo; of wineries in the years before a wine-friendly policy. The &ldquo;Second Wave&rdquo; of wineries followed the 2001 Maharashtra Grape Processing Policy &mdash; mostly grape farmers, with little understanding of sales and marketing. The &ldquo;Third Wave&rdquo; would consist of people with the means and ability to make good wine and market them in India and abroad.

Three cheers for enterprise

Finance commissions are the only statutory instrument through which equalisation in access to public services is sought to be achieved in the Indian federal structure. Parallel state-level commissions exist for third-tier local services within each state. Couched in legalese, the terms of reference of national finance commissions have an arcane ring for those unfamiliar with articles and clauses in the Constitution, but the core burden of their task is to ensure the capability for roughly equivalent levels of public services to any Indian citizen, regardless of state of location. Finance commissions attempt compensation for differences in fiscal need, modified by cost disabilities, across this vast and varied country. This is necessary, but not sufficient, to ensure equality of access.

Indira Rajaraman: Barriers to Equalisation

There&rsquo;s a snobbish trend these days to assume that if you spend time and money on glossy art books with more images and less text, you know very little. I used to be one of those snobs too. But then I changed my mind. The more I think of it, the more I realise that a good publication with good reproductions is really the only way most of us will ever really see art. If you wanted to see Matisse&rsquo;s famous &ldquo;Dancers&rdquo;, would you travel to the Hermitage and spend a day there? Ideally, yes. But in our own rushed lives, sadly, this is unlikely. But you could see it in any of the many books available all over India.

Art under cover

I know&mdash; so did Martin Luther King, and so did Abba. But my dream is neither about the state of Mississippi being transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice, nor about having a song to sing to help me cope with everything. Mine is possibly harder to turn into reality.

I have a dream...

I&rsquo;m an admirer of the USA. America is the greatest success story in history. It is a vibrant democracy, which has done so much for humanity.

K Natwar Singh: Nastiness is not irreverence

The British detective novel has famously been popular with little old ladies. Part of its charm in that market is its safe-as-houses premise of violent deeds staged in a limited compass, and a cast of suspects numbering no more than a dozen.

Black Frost

At a lunch in Delhi, I was confronted by a woman in a pink sari who lectured me on the importance of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). No one came to my rescue for 10 minutes, and I began to fret. I wondered how to get away from her without causing offence. Then, I remembered an advice from a Bengali friend who had mentioned that in such situations a white lie was one&rsquo;s best ally. So, I glanced over my overbearing tormentor&rsquo;s shoulder as though someone had distracted me, and whispered loudly, &ldquo;Coming, coming!&rdquo; to the imaginary person. Then I lied brazenly to my oppressor, &ldquo;Ah, what a pity, I am being dragged away,&rdquo; and I moved on, shaking my head reluctantly.

Gurcharan Das: Remember, the money doesn't belong to you!

The food crisis was obvious in July but the government had unrealistic hopes of a good rabi.

Shreekant Sambrani: Crisis foretold

Jyoti Basu died on a Sunday (January 17), Monday was declared a state holiday, Tuesday was the funeral and Wednesday was Saraswati Puja. The holiday mood for Bengalis just got extended with offices shut again for Netaji&rsquo;s birthday on the 23rd, giving them another long weekend.

Keya Sarkar: Clash of cultures

In Sri Lanka, the president can do exactly as he likes.

Aditi Phadnis: The appearance of democracy

I&rsquo;m not at my best at three o&rsquo; clock in the morning, a time when even party animals are winding up for the night, but a host of circumstances had conspired to keep me awake. At least part of it had to do with a newly acquired friend who, even though we had not met but only spoken on the phone, was furiously posting SMSes that kept pinging with military-like precision as she poured her heart out about relatives and akin species. Somebody, she texted furiously, was posing as the sole heir to a fortune that should have been hers by marriage. Another was trying to mutate properties in his name. &ldquo;They&rsquo;re all bloody thieves,&rdquo; she wrote.

Kishore Singh: Strangers in the night

Till the Budget, there will be many trading opportunities in the energy sector.

Energise your trades

Bharatiya Janata Party president Nitin Gadkari&rsquo;s initiative to create an organisational framework for reflecting on policy matters, involving chief ministers of party run state governments, is a good idea. India&rsquo;s opposition political parties have for long lived the life of Dr Jekyll, while in government, and Mr Hyde, while in opposition. As Prime Minister Manmohan Singh once famously commented on political doublespeak: don&rsquo;t judge politicians by what they say when in opposition, but by what they do when in government! To an extent it is understandable that an opposition political party needs a slogan to campaign against the government to turn the tide of public opinion towards itself and against the ruling political party. However, with governments increasingly having revolving doors it is not always easy to figure out who is in opposition and who is in office.

Shadow cabinets and consensus

All those strategic pundits who concluded that the international system had become G-2 &mdash; with US and China sharing a cosy duopoly &mdash; would have had a rude awakening with the notification of the proposed $6.4 billion US arms sales to Taiwan and China&rsquo;s predictable reaction to it.

K Subrahmanyam: Yin and Yang in the US-China relationship

Higher education &mdash; or what goes for higher education in India &mdash; itself is, save a few shining examples, either a money-spinning business or a moth-eaten system.

'Most self-financed colleges exploit the demand-supply gap'

China&rsquo;s exchange rate policy has largely been viewed through the prism of global imbalances. That has had three unfortunate consequences. It has allowed China to deflect attention away from its policy. It has obscured the real victims of this policy. And it has made political resolution of this policy more difficult.

Arvind Subramanian: It is the poor who pay for the weak renminbi

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