Indian Current Affairs: 16.10.2007

Bio-pharmaceuticals: Includes vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics.
Bio-services: Clinical trials, contract research and manufacturing.
Bio-agriculture: Hybrid seeds, bio-pesticides and bio-fertilizers.
Bio-industrials: Enzyme manufacturing used in detergents, textiles, food, leather and paper.
Bio-informatics: It involves the use of techniques including applied mathematics, informatics, statistics, computer science, artificial intelligence, to solve biological problems usually on the molecular level.

We have noted earlier that Reliance Industries Limited (Mukesh Ambani company) and RNRL (Anil Ambani company) have developed differences over their agreement relating to supply of natural gas by RIL to RNRL. Look at the differences here.
The Bombay High court has now asked them to renegotiate the gas supply deal as it has run counter to the Ambani family settlement. They are given 4 months time to renegotiate the deal.
In this connection you may also be interested in looking at the gas pricing issue.

The prize for 2007 was announced to three American economists: Roger Myerson, Eric Maskin and Leonid Hurwicz.
Their work is called Mechanism Design theory and it explains how markets allocate resources and why they might be the best way of doing so. Their work has provided foundation for bilateral trade negotiations and design of auction systems for mobile communications.

Some Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have not been providing flying rights to multiple carriers, resulting in Air India and Indian becoming the only entities to figure in the bilaterals.
Saudi Arabia has been insisting on one-nation one-carrier principle with India. The government is making efforts to make way for Jet and Deccan also.
With EU it is trying to have a horizontal air service agreement. This will obviate the need for entering into bilaterals with various countries of the EU and will treat EU as a single entity.

SEBI has come up with these Qualified Institutional Placement norms in May 2006 in response to the companies’ requirement of raising capital locally rather than from overseas. These norms provide for raising capital through private offering for 49 people. As per Company Law a company cannot make a private offer to more than 49 people.
SEBI is now working on investor eligibility and floor price issues in these offerings.

Of the 21 companies with licences to trade power, only 9 are operating. Two main reasons for this:

The price ceiling put by CERC at 4 paise per unit.
Restrictions on sale of power from one trader to another trader. For eg., state corporations like APTRANSCO or Gridco in Orissa are categorized as traders and are not allowed to supply power to traders. This has dried up surplus and has affected trading volumes.

These are tribes that are the creatures of the Colonial period. They arose out of the theory that some Indian communities were hereditary criminals by caste. This belief led to the passage of the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871.
The major provisions of the Act were:

All members of these tribes had to report at regular intervals and had to inform the authorities about their whereabouts/absence from their residences for a day or more.
They were all given passes by the administration which had to be carried by them when they make trips outside their settlement.
Tribes were declared ‘criminal’ and had to answer a roll call, which could take place at any unscheduled hour. If a member failed to respond, the onus of proving that he had no evil intentions during his absence from his residence was on him.

There were 201 tribes that were identified in this enactment. This Act was repealed in 1952.

In a very good article making out a case for a transshipment hub at Vizhinjam, IIMB students throw some light into its economics. Take a look at the full article here.
A transshipment port typically handles high ratios of transit cargo compared to the locally bound cargo. Hence they need to be adjacent to international shipping lines and possess deep draft to accommodate large vessels.
Typically a vessel greater than 6000 TEU in size requires water depth greater than 16 meters. Indian ports like Mumbai, Chennai, Mangalore and Tuticorin have natural depths of 10-14 meters. Vizhinjam in Kerala has a depth of 20 meters.
A single container transshipped from Colombo to Cochin incurs an expenditure of $1,200. If it was directly landed at Cochin it would cost only $400.
80% of Indian containers are transshipped at Colombo, Singapore and Dubai. Indian ships account for 80% of Colombo’s traffic.

In view of the surging inflows of dollars the RBI resorts to what is called sterilization. Do you know that the weighted average cost of undertaking such sterilization operations is about 3%? This translates to about Rs. 6,500 crores when the full quota of MSS (Rs. 200,000 crores) is utilized. Experts feel that this is a cost that is much bearable than letting the rupee strengthen to about Rs. 37 per dollar. The economic costs unleashed by a strengthening rupee would be much more than this, economists feel.

Indian Current Affairs