Opinions and Editorials

Ratan Tata usually gets to headlines by talking sense. As he is chairman of one of India's largest and most venerable corporate groups, any movement on the question of his succession is bound to grab attention.

Full Marx Last week, at an ongoing conference of the International Labour Office in Geneva, a communist trade union leader from India gave an impassioned speech on the virtues of Marxism and how capitalism is ruining the world.

That there is already a controversy surrounding the Competition Commission, as reported by FE yesterday, isn't necessarily a bad thing—at least, after many years in the making, the Competition Commission is at last being noticed.

In May, when Mamata Banerjee took charge of the Union railways ministry in the West Bengal capital instead of at Rail Bhawan in Delhi, she cited a natural disaster—cyclone Aila—for breaking with precedence.

During his meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao, US President Barack Obama will try to manoeuvre some wins off a reluctant China.

India's public-private partnership (PPP) programme in infrastructure has acquired substantial size over the last few years.

The Sebi Committee on Disclosures & Accounting Standards has recommended that the audited figures of the major heads of the balance sheet be disclosed by listed companies on a half-yearly basis.

Big banks are a troublesome thing. The world faces some important questions on how to deal with them. There are three incremental paths: (a) better mechanisms for closing down distressed banks, (b) better banking regulation and (c) emphasising a more market-dominated financial system.

It's a classic case of the best-laid plans gone awry. Gujarat CM Narendra Modi's attempts to rescript corporate social responsibility (CSR) in his state by making it mandatory for state-owned public sector units to contribute a portion of their profits to a common kitty specially formed to fund development projects by the state government seem to have come to naught.

It's an irony of sorts. Though bank credit to the corporate sector has declined, companies are tapping other sources of funds with élan. They are tapping equity, corporate debt, qualified institutional placements and the overseas market to fund their working capital and capital expenditure needs. The low-cost advantage offered by commercial paper and bonds, at around 3.

We have a deadline of April 2010 for GST (goods & services tax), a deadline first promised in budget for 2007-08. On November 10, Empowered Committee of State Finance Ministers released the first discussion paper on GST.  That is a bit late in the day, if the deadline of April 2010 is serious.

After decades of rapid growth and surges in capital inflows, East Asia faced a sudden withdrawal of capital flows and a sharp crisis in 1997-98, which brought the growth in much of that region to a screeching halt.There is a similar debate on capital inflows now after the recent crisis.

While the investment scenario improves and efforts are made to increase the level of infrastructure in India, regulators and intermediaries in the game should be looking at providing reliable data, especially of key market participants like the foreign institutional investor's trades and mutual fund data.

The leading narrative of our time, which places the US and China at the apex of the global power game, demands that special attention be paid to Barack Obama's first visit to China as US President.

The BJP has spent the past year lurching from crisis to crisis. What has really been at issue is a stark political choice: whether the BJP is content to remain the party of the Hindu right that a section of its supporters would like it to be, or whether it wants to finally become a pro-market, socially conservative party with a broader electoral appeal.

The mutual funds industry in India, now under pressure to reinvent its distribution system, is turning towards technology.

On the face of it, Sebi's latest move to allow auctions for the Qualified Institutional Buyers (QIBs) part of follow-up offerings, presumably a precursor to its use in IPOs as well, is a major change—a welcome and, some would even say, overdue one.

When Windows 7 was released, we took note of the fawning reviews it had received. Especially of the fact that it was the first Microsoft operating system to have been released with fewer features, a phenomenon we explained in terms of cloud computing. Cloud services include Web-based e-mail, social networking and online games—everything that transposes services from PCs to virtual data centres.

Perhaps the most pleasing trend, at least for long-term observers of Indian politics, from the general election held earlier this year was the decimation of the fractious 'Third Front'. Finally, there was reason to believe that India was heading towards a broadly bipolar polity with the Centre-Left Congress party leading one pole and the Centre-Right BJP leading the other.

Mining is a dangerous fruit. It is often extraordinarily abundant but can also have the capacity to damage, distort and corrupt. In Jharkhand, ex-chief minister Koda has been accused of extracting large sums from the allocation of mining leases.