Indian Current Affairs: 27.08.2008

ONGC Videsh (OVL), the foreign investment arm of the country’s largest exploration company, ONGC, on Tuesday put in a formal bid to acquire UK-based oil firm Imperial Energy at 1,250 pence per share.
Imperial Energy, with assets in the Russian Federation and CIS countries, is valued at $2.58 billion at the bid price. In the financial year ended December 31, 2007, Imperial’s production was 833,799 bbl. The company has approximately 920 million boe (barrel oil equivalent) of independently estimated proven and probable hydrocarbon reserves and approximately 3.4 billion boe of independently estimated proven plus probable plus possible hydrocarbon reserves.
While the management that holds a 6.3% stake in the company has already given a binding irrevocable commitment to sell its stake at the bid price, there is a further commitment (although not irrevocable) by Baillie Gifford & Co which holds 9.2% stake to sell out. With commitments of over 15% already in the bag, ONGC will approach other institutional stakeholders once regulatory approvals come in. The company will be given 28 days to make the open offer after the regulatory approvals come in.
The deal is expected to close in 45 days. The offer by OVL lapses on December 31, 2008.
Is it a matter of time before we also get worried over our overseas assets and oil security and talk like the USA about defending our energy security?

Look at this sentence:
Domestic airlines, pummelled by surging crude oil prices in the past two years, are planning to hike fares for the seventh time this year.
Meaning of pummelled here: Struck, usually with the fist

With ATF (Aviation turbine fuel) prices ruling very high, from about Rs. 21,000 a kilolitre back in 2004 to about Rs. 71,000 airlines have now decided that they can’t help but raise the fares. Intense competition among them for grabbing market share has forced them not to price their sales economically. The result is that this year they are expected to lose about $1.5 bn.
ATF costs comprise of about 35 to 40% of an airline’s operational costs typically in India.

With the whole agitation boiling down to as one between separatists versus nationalists, the Centre decided to display some resolve on its part and decided to adopt a different strategy to tackle the agitation. While a four-member committee constituted by J&K governor has kicked off talks with SAYSS on resolving the land row, security forces have been asked to the handle secessionist protests with an iron hand.
Farooq Abdullah government had in 2000 enacted “the J&K Shrine Board Act’’ to provide basic facilities to pilgrims and managing the religious shrine. Since the state government had refused to allocate any land to run the functions of the shrine board effectively, a writ petition was filed in the J&K high court. In its ruling delivered on April 15, 2005, a single-judge bench upheld the decision to transfer land to the shrine board.
It is consequent to this that the J&K government had allotted 800 kanals of land to the shrine board. Now this is what is at the centre of the whole agitation. The separatists as well as the opposition parties in J&K now demand that this land transfer be annulled. The nationalists and people in Jammu want the land transfer to be gone ahead with. A clear divide between Jammu and Kashmir is thus visible.

This phrase describes the state of affairs in which our IT companies find themselves in today. Their revenue growth is a function of employee head count. The more the number of employees, the bigger is a company’s revenue. This is a big concern given the already large numbers of employees.
Infosys’s acquisition of British consulting firm Axon is an attempt by it to beat this linearity of growth - by diversifying into higher-end services such as consulting, package implementation, systems integration and products.

Strongly recommended. You should have such analysis in your repertoire to write meaningful essays on subjects like these when called for.

“Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable,” quipped the late economist John Galbraith some four decades ago in his memoir titled Ambassador’s Journal!

Read this. Though I am not in full agreement with both the authors, it does serve our purpose in so far as your ability to articulate your own view point gets enhanced.
At the end of reading this debate, I am only left wondering about why should there be such a strict separation of powers between judiciary and executive. Remember the Sylvester Stallone starrer that came a decade or so ago? The roles of executive and judiciary are combined to a large extent in that movie. Though I won’t subscribe to that world view, I think there should be some sort of coordination between the judiciary and the executive to ensure that the executive speeds up its investigation processes and the judiciary disposes of the cases at a meaningful pace. Otherwise the spectre of delayed justice stays as the order of the day and law-breakers can get away with impunity by committing any crime; being fully aware and confident that by the time they are brought to justice they will perhaps be not alive anyway.

We were noting that Virgin Mobile’s entry into India heralds the entry of MVNOs (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) in India, sometime back; right?
Wrong say DoT, Tata Tele and Virgin Mobile.
An MVNO would involve purchase of minutes from facility-based mobile network, freedom to prescribe tariff, customer ownership and separate licence. But the Tata-Virgin JV did not involve any of these factors, and hence is not an MVNO.

Indian Current Affairs