Indian Current Affairs: 07.05.2008

I hope you know that these are Pepsi brands. It is unusual for doctors to promote commercial products. The IMA (Indian Medical Association) has to particularly allow doctors to do so.
It has now allowed them to do so in a rare exception. In the past, the medical body which represents over 1,75,000 doctors in the country, has endorsed Reckitt Benckiser’s Dettol soap, Procter & Gamble’s Pampers diapers, and Eureka Forbes’ water purifiers.

Burma is hit by a cyclone called Nargis last Saturday.
The cyclone death toll soared above 22,000 on Tuesday and more than 41,000 others were missing as foreign countries mobilised to rush in aid after the country’s deadliest storm on record.
Up to 1 million people may be homeless. Some villages have been almost totally eradicated and vast rice-growing areas are wiped out. Irrawaddy River delta region, which is regarded as Myanmar’s rice bowl, is reportedly worst hit.

You might know that UBS, the Switzerland based bank is the world’s largest bank. It has also been hit by the US subprime crisis and has suffered the largest losses so far by any single entity.

This is a trust which has been set up jointly by the Government of India and SIDBI (Small Industries Development Bank of India) to extend guarantees against loans to be provided to Medium and Small Enterprises.
Banks and FIs (Financial Institutions) sanction credit to eligible borrowers based on viability of projects and seek guarantee cover from the trust against payment of one-time guarantee fee and annual service charges.
Under the scheme, the trust guarantees up to 75% of the credit risk subject to loan cap of Rs. 50 lakh and guarantee cap of Rs. 37.5 lakh per borrower in the general category.

India is not willing to rest on its laurels after winning the battle against the US amended customs bond directive (CBD), that placed additional financial burden on shrimp exporters from the country, rendering them uncompetitive. While the WTO panel had ruled the requirement by the US on India and Thailand to post bonds to cover full anti-dumping duties on imports of shrimp violated trade rules, India has decided to challenge the rulings of the panel which had inferred that the amended CBD was not inconsistent with the WTO antidumping agreement.
Anti-dumping duties on shrimps to the extent of 10% of the exported value were imposed by the US on exports from India, Brazil, Ecuador, Thailand, China and Vietnam in February 2005. The amended CBD was introduced soon after on exports from India and Thailand.

Last year people all across the country have reportedly purchased close to 780 tonnes of gold.

If at all you need an example of people of various hues paying lip service to a cause, you can’t get a better example than the one about Women’s quota bill. By now it would have been clear to you that all the major political parties only want to score brownie points as regards this bill, rather than its sincere passage and implementation.
The Election Commission suggested a law that would make it mandatory for all political parties to give 33.3% of their tickets to women. Reserving 33.3% tickets for women would not guarantee that 33.3% of our MPs are women. Parties that oppose the bill on the plea that there should be OBC and SC/ST quotas within the 33.3% women’s quota are only indulging in regressive populism.
Given the abject lack of consensus on the issue of quota for women in Parliament, all the parties should affect a tactical shift in their emphasis towards other areas of institutional life. They could, for one, put in place legislation mandating quotas for women on boards of companies. Norway, with its legally mandated 40% quota for women on the boards of its companies, could be a good example to follow.

The difference between core and non-core inflation and why RBI can’t have pure and simple monetary policy solutions for fighting inflation.

The organised sector has barely 30 million employees out of a workforce of 430 million. Most of the 30 million are government employees, whose wages are set by decadal Pay Commissions, not annual wage bargaining, like in the West. Thus, they can never contribute to an inflationary spiral frequently.
Even in the west, central banks typically target core inflation, excluding the prices of food and fuel, which are seen as beyond the control of monetary policy. Core-inflation targeting can work because food and fuel account for only a small share of consumption in the West, and other items of consumption are more controllable by monetary policy.
But in poor countries like India, food constitutes half the budget of the poor. Even a modest rise in food prices can be catastrophic. Fuel prices matter much less, yet remain so politically sensitive that they have price controls. So, in India, core inflation is a largely irrelevant target — what matters above all is non-core inflation. Hence monetary policy cannot be the only tool to fight inflation.

US federal court officials have warned that hackers are emailing phony subpoenas embedded with malicious software to high-ranking executives to steal valuable corporate information. Thousands of powerful US executives have received the bogus emails that contain links which, if clicked on, install software letting hackers take control of computers and swipe passwords or other sensitive data. Internet security insiders refer to the attacks as “whaling” because they use social-engineering trickery involved in “phishing” but target individual “big phish” instead of casting nets in a sea of internet users.
This enables criminals to capture passwords and other personal or financial information and starts software that allows the computer to be controlled remotely.
Subpoenas in the United States are usually served in person to assure judges that the orders from courts have been properly received by those named.

Indian Current Affairs