The war against Maoists is going to take up many headlines quite soon. A determined home minister is evidently getting ready to step up the battle in what the Prime Minister has declared to be the most serious domestic security problem the country has ever faced (hence more serious than either Kashmir or Punjab or the north-east). The action seems likely to be focused on the heartland states of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, which Mr Chidambaram visited the other day.

T N Ninan: A grim challenge

Business Standard

Happy Daughter&rsquo;s Day. This landmark event, in case you hadn&rsquo;t noticed, has just gone by on September 27 and was being tom-tommed in shops crammed with advance cargoes of festival goodies. Coming up are a host of other happys&mdash;Happy Friendship Day, Happy Mother&rsquo;s Day and the famous lovers&rsquo; tryst in February, under the patronage of St Valentine, that continues to raise the hackles of ultra-conservative Indians.

Sunil Sethi: Marketing the gifts of gods

Former Revenue and Rural Development Secretary D Bandyopadhyay handed over his seminal work &mdash; a report on land reform in Bihar &mdash; to Chief Minister Nitish Kumar in July. Accepting the copy, the chief minister said in colloquial Hindi: &ldquo;Mr Bandyopadhyay, if you steal Rs 5,00,000, no one will say a word to you. But if you steal another man&rsquo;s wife or his land, they will be ready to murder you&rdquo;.

Aditi Phadnis: Nitish&#39;s clouded clout

The pricing of natural gas, which lies at the heart of the Mukesh Ambani-Anil Ambani dispute, is likely to get even more controversial in the days ahead as more natural gas supplies come on to the market.

Jyoti Mukul: Getting the gas equation right

I was in Pelling, Sikkim last week, wondering why the North East is not a different time zone from the rest of India. At 5.30 in the evening, the sun had dipped low, and the silvery peak of Kanchnejunga was beginning to blend with the horizon. &ldquo;Seeing how long evenings stretch here, I can quite understand why Sikkim is reputed to have the third-highest per capita alcoholism rate among Indian states, behind only Punjab and Haryana!&rdquo; said my husband.

Geetanjali Krishna: The spirit of the hills

Last week, I had every reason to believe that Gandhi would have been proud of my daughter. Out of the blue, one day, she began to practice the kind of austerities that Bapu embodied in his lifestyle. &ldquo;Be the change you want to see,&rdquo; she echoed him, and though she didn&rsquo;t go so far as to start spinning khadi, or even eschew violence if shouting at the presswali who had ironed the pleats on a dress all wrong was any indication, she did turn frugal in her diet.

Kishore Singh: Experiments with Bapu

With the nation's socialist dreams falling apart, the big question is what next.

Anurag Viswanath: At 60, China still in a predicament

There was a stunning omission from the government&rsquo;s latest list of &ldquo;problem&rdquo; banks, which ran to 416 lenders, a 15-year high, as of June 30. One outfit not on the list was Georgian Bank, the second-largest Atlanta-based bank, which supposedly had plenty of capital. It failed last week.

Jonathan Weil: Banks have the world flying blind on depth of losses

Stanley Kramer's Inherit the Wind is the perfect ode to Darwin.

Of men and monkeys

Reliance Fresh's service needs a fresh look.

Fruitless quest

When this United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) ends next year, the UN would have completed 65 years of existence. These past decades have seen the world change in fundamental ways. Connectivity defines our global condition, and the challenges that we collectively face are global. The resolution of these challenges, as we are aware, require global approaches and solutions. What may happen in one part of the world has an impact on other regions.

&#39;Institutions have not kept pace with global issues&#39;

To our grocery shopper go Reliance's spoils.

Rotten buys

Social audit of rural jobs scheme promises to empower people with information about how they are being denied the benefits of the schemes meant for them.

Sreelatha Menon: Making people their own cops

With debt not so attractive anymore, one can look at select sectors in equities.

Stock up on select stocks

It is a myth that the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) are moving towards full fair value measurement. Rather, there are only a few fair value measurements in a typical IFRS balance sheet. However, the use of fair value in IFRS is more extensive than the use of the same in the Indian GAAP. Therefore, application of the fair value measurement principles in implementing IFRS will be an important challenge before the accounting fraternity in India.

IFRS - Fair Value Challenge

When a foreign enterprise undertakes any work in India involving construction, assembly, installation or commissioning of any building or project or supervisory activities in connection therewith, a question arises whether such activities create the foreign enterprise&rsquo;s Permanent Establishment (PE) in India or not. The foreign enterprise will be liable to tax in India only if the PE exists.

Creation of permanent establishment in India

There have been two recent developments in regard to interest liability in cases of erroneously availed CENVAT credits on inputs. The question of law is whether in terms of the CENVAT Credit Rules 2004 (the Rules), the liability to interest is triggered upon the erroneous or incorrect availment of input tax credits or whether such liability is only applicable where such erroneously availed CENVAT credits are utilised to discharge duties on output products in which such inputs are used.

Interest on erroneously availed CENVAT credits

The trade numbers for August 2009, released by the ministry of commerce and industry last week, indicate that the declining trend is far from over, although the negative momentum may be slowing a bit. Exports in August showed a year-on-year drop of 19.4 per cent in dollar terms, somewhat better than the 30 per cent decrease seen during the April-August period, but still reflecting a sluggish global market as also lower commodity prices compared to a year earlier (when they were at their peak). This pattern will persist until September, after which a significant base effect will kick in and the year-on-year growth rates will climb to near-zero levels. It is only in 2010, when the US and Europe are expected to return to positive GDP growth rates, that the export numbers will turn respectable. Even then, it will take some time for volumes to return to the very buoyant levels that were seen during the first half of 2008-09, before the decline began last October.

A changing picture

Pakistan&rsquo;s decision to approach the World Bank for appointing a neutral adjudicator for the controversial Kishenganga hydropower project on the Jhelum appears to be a tactical move designed to further delay a scheme that can spur economic development in the region. The project, started in 1994 on the Kishenganga, a tributary of the Jhelum known as Neelum in Pakistan, envisages the production of 330 Mw of hydroelectricity for power-starved Jammu and Kashmir. It has been dragged into needless controversy right from the beginning by Pakistan, which subsequently decided to put up its own 990-Mw hydropower plant on the same river. Pakistan&rsquo;s move on the Kishenganga is, in a way, a repeat of its similar but unsuccessful bid to stall the 900-Mw Baglihar power project on the Chenab in Jammu and Kashmir.

Stalling Kishenganga

In my last column, I wrote about the three &ldquo;global public goods&rdquo; on which the Pittsburgh G-20 summit would attempt to find some common ground. These were cross-border financial regulation, climate change and free trade. The most one could have realistically expected from a summit was a broad statement of commitment to goals and the principles on which the pursuit of these goals would be based. The actual process of hammering out agreements on strategy would obviously be left to existing or new mechanisms that had the capacity to deal with detail. Did the Pittsburgh event meet some minimum criteria for the success of a summit? In several respects, I believe it did. Here are a few, somewhat random, assessments on what I consider to be significant outcomes of the event.

Subir Gokarn: The Pittsburgh principles

At a time when the flow of institutional credit has tended to look up, pointing to economic recovery, the disbursal of agricultural credit has dipped by an astonishing 30 per cent, putting the prospects of recovery in the drought-ravaged farm sector in jeopardy. The numbers released by the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (Nabard) indicate that both commercial banks and cooperative credit outlets are lagging behind their targets by margins so wide as to be difficult to bridge in even the next (rabi) season. Total credit to the agricultural sector till August 31 was reckoned at Rs 1,10,000 crore, which is just 34 per cent of the target of Rs 3,25,000 crore set for 2009-10. This is worrisome because the kharif season normally accounts for 60 per of total agricultural loans. Going by this norm, disbursals should have been nearly twice what they have been so far this year.

Shrinking credit to farmers

Business Standard brings you expert opinions on various issues

Page 846 - Opinion Specials