It's interesting that an electoral verdict that left the largest party 66 seats short of a majority is being seen as &ldquo;decisive&rdquo;, and even hailed as &ldquo;overwhelming&rdquo; in some circles. Hyperbole aside, this is a pointer to the fact that India has lived with tenuous coalitions for 20 years.

Devangshu Datta: Fractured, as before

Business Standard

When I had first arrived in Santiniketan, it had taken me quite a while to open a bank account. Primarily, because I had no papers to prove my locus-standi. But thanks to a very kind manager of the United Bank of India, I managed to open an account with them.

Keya Sarkar: No access banking

Think of summer in the Mediterranean and images of a cold gazpacho soup over lunch automatically float into your mind. In India too, there has been a long tradition of summer foods. The mango panna, for instance &mdash; tart, spicy and aromatic with mint &mdash; has long been favoured to ward off the heat. Similarly, there is little to beat the lightness and wholesomeness of a meal of curd-rice.

New summer foods


There&rsquo;s an interesting mix of people in the room: I tote up a corporate filmmaker, an irreverent fiction writer, two bohemian artists, a brilliant photographer, a couple of gossipy journalists, an exporter who goes to sleep in Madrid but wakes up in Cairo, entrepreneurs with exciting start-ups, a designer who can&rsquo;t stop talking about which Hollywood stars wore his threads, a theatre director working on a new play, a few diplomats, a shippie, a chef, some technocrats and

Kishore Singh:The art of being boring

Parliamentarians, British or Indian, are all humbugs.

Sunanda K Datta-Ray: Fudging expenses

Suppose, just suppose, that Sonia Gandhi had said that she wanted both Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi, Robert Vadra and another relative of the Nehru-Gandhis (no, not Varun) to all be accommodated in Manmohan Singh's council of ministers. Imagine what the air waves would have been full of, and what the front pages would have screamed. So why is the same response not there when M.

T N Ninan: 'Monopoly' politics

Twitter lends another dimension to the 'share and watch it grow' culture.

Free for all

The new government faces a lot of challenges, but reforming the power sector is key.

Time for sane and timely decisions

This is the first war heroes commemoration rally being held in the country that has obtained complete freedom after 30 years. I address you today in a country that is completely free, in a unitary state, under a single national standard.

Global leaders advised us against fighting LTTE

Yash Pal committee has given all the ideas - including the setting up of a higher education commission - that the new government needs to implement to reform the education system.

Sreelatha Menon: A Sebi for higher education

Some time ago, a couple that owned a restaurant in Noida (neighbouring Delhi) fell out and the dispute reached the Company Law Board. The husband and wife were equal partners and after some haggling the husband agreed to sell his holding to the wife for Rs 10 lakh. The wife said she could pay Rs 1 lakh every month. It was agreed that the payment would be made on the 30th of every month in the presence of Board Chairman S Balasubramanian.

Conciliatory trend

Cenvat credit has become so much of a litigated subject that by random counting I found amongst the reported judgements in some magazines that nearly one-fourth to one-third of the cases relate to admissibility of Cenvat Credit in some way or the other. My suggestion here is that controversies that occur again and again on several items can certainly be removed or minimized if a list of items is prepared and circulated by the Board in monthly intervals.

How to reduce litigation on Cenvat

A recent decision of the Supreme Court with regard to imposition of a penalty under certain provisions of the Central Excise Act, which have equivalence in service tax law, is of considerable interest as it clarifies an important point which was always clear in law but which had unfortunately been construed as having changed as per an earlier decision of the Supreme Court in that regard.

Imposition of penalty under service tax law

Just imagine &ndash; a mid-size listed company, which prepares its accounts on a cash basis, does not account for contingent liabi-lities, or depreciates its assets, or records its debtors and payables, and just prepares its cash flow statement. No investor would even touch such a company. Now ima-gine, that the expenditure of that company is more than 30 per cent of the country&rsquo;s Gross Domestic Product and the stakeholders are a billion plus &ndash; yes, the entity we are talking of is the Government of India.

Government: A time to account for

Trinamool Congress leader and new Railway Minister Mamata Banerjee has called for a review of the Special Economic Zones (SEZ) policy. Whoever takes over as the Union commerce minister will have to do it in any case, as it is nearly four years since the SEZ Act, 2005, came into effect and over three years since the SEZ Rules, 2006, were put in place. A performance assessment can do no harm but certainly the SEZ developers who have already acquired land and sunk their money in developing infrastructure and the units, which have obtained approvals and started their operations, should not be left wondering for long as to whether any policy changes will affect them. They need to be assured quickly that any policy changes will affect only the intending SEZ developers and SEZ units.

Need to make SEZ laws error-free

Benoit Mandelbrot saw fractals everywhere. Time wasn't one of them.

Time triads

Signs of a deepening recession in the US, Japan and Europe have prompted investors to pull money out of developed-market stocks.

EM inflows on the rise

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who began his second term this week, may set a record for selling state assets as he revives efforts that were foiled by his former communist allies, bankers and analysts said.

Assets sale may ease fiscal concerns

The transition of the government accounting system to a greater level of transparency and efficiency has begun with the introduction of the Indian Government Accounting Standards. The first five of a series of protocols are scheduled to be notified in the coming days and will take effect from the next fiscal year. More sets of standards will be issued as the process gains momentum, culminating in the full implementation of an accrual-based accounting system in five years.

Changing govt accounts

After nearly a decade, and an impressive electoral victory, Mamata Banerjee returns to the railways to take up a major challenge. The railways have had a good run in recent years, but now face an uphill task in terms of both revenue and expenditure. Freight traffic, the biggest source of revenue, had been hit last year by the impact of the economic slowdown. There has been some recovery in the first two months of the current year, but the undercurrent of weakness remains.

Challenging railway schedule

Rapid economic growth and increasing military strength are essential to meeting geo-political challenges.

Deepak Lal: Tasks for an emerging superpower

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