01.09.2007

• India’s economy on a roll
• It posted a 9.3% growth in the first quarter i.e., for April-June quarter of current year.
• Manufacturing, construction and services sectors have fuelled the growth, while agriculture also witnessed noticeable improvement.
• The growths recorded are:
• Manufacturing 11.9%
• Agriculture 3.8%
• Construction 10.7%
• Trade, hotels, transport & communication services 12%
• One more Indian at the top in an MNC
• Mr. Deven Sharma is chosen as the head (President) of the renowned credit rating agency Standard & Poor.
• S&P is the world’s largest credit rating agency.
• Recently S&P received lot of flack for not sounding advance alarms on the subprime mortgage problem.
• Pact with Madhesis to bring peace in Nepal’s Terai region
• Nepal government entered into a pact with Madhesis primarily agreeing to restructure Nepal as a federal country with autonomous states, and to give proportional representation to Madhesis.
• Protests in Terai erupted this year to wrest equal rights for Madhesis, who have little access to education, health care and state jobs though they form over 30% of Nepal’s population.
• Madhesis are people from the Terai plains.
• The Terai, (i.e. " moist land ") is the submontane strip of marshy jungle stretching beneath the lower ranges of the Himalayas in northern India and southern Nepal. This strip may be said to extend roughly from the Yamuna river on the west to the Brahmaputra on the east.
• Should political parties necessarily have an ideology?
• “Democracy sans parties dangerous” is an interesting article that appeared in today’s ET. It explains how regional parties that have little or no ideology contribute to a political culture that delegitimises the party system. But it has also raked in me a doubt as to whether ideology is a sine qua non for the existence of a political party.
• As of May 2004, there are about 173 political parties across the country.
• In the recent heated debate about the Indo-US nuclear deal, it was only the Left, the BJP and the Congress which had any ideological stance on the subject. All the other parties have reduced their stance to one of aligning with or against some other political party, for their own political ends which are far removed from the merits/de-merits of having the deal. This innocence of ideology, helps them to move across the spectrum between the Congress the BJP and also allows them to launch agitations against a cause when out of power and suppress it when they are in power.
• An interesting debate that arises out of the above proposition is that whether an ideology is a sine qua non for a political party in the first place. My answer is, it is not necessary for every political party to have an ideological stance on every matter of political interest. Every party, big and small, certainly has some ideology of its own – on issues that matter to it most. On others it prefers to remain without expressing any opinion and on some others it may not be in a position to articulate its ideology. That itself does not make it any less important as a political party. There are surely other issues/causes which are dearer to its heart than what the others are besieged with.
• Dairy facts and figures
• About 70 mn farmers are engaged in dairy farming in India.
• The cooperative network covers only 12 mn farmers in 1.15 lakh villages in the country.
• The organized sector handles only 18% of the milk produced in the country.
• The average daily production of milk in India is 1.5 litres per animal. In comparison, the average daily animal yield in areas covered by Operation Flood – largely the area under the cooperative movement – is 6.4 litres for a cross-bred cow, 1.9 litres for an indigenous cow and 4.2 litres for a buffalo.
• There are 58 mn farmers outside the cooperative movement at present.
• If you are asked to define a bank, can you give any smarter definition than this one?
• It is something that a) takes deposits, b) provides loans, c) pretends to its depositors that their money is safe (its liabilities are more liquid than its assets), d) collects net interest as a result, and e) gets away with it almost all the time.
• The above is a definition given by Bradford Delong, professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley.
• Neutron scattering
• Discovered in the 1940’s, this is an excellent tool to study and know how materials are made so that they can be improved upon – lighter, cheaper and stronger.
• Do you want a good critique of the recommendations of the SC Gupta committee’s recommendations on money lending?
• Read today’s centre page article “The crowning of the moneylender” in The Hindu.