15.09.2008

• Why are companies buying dollars here and selling them abroad?
• You might have remembered something about the NDF market that we noted sometime back in our blog. Don't remember? Then see this.
• Indian corporates are buying dollars in India and selling them abroad, according to news reports. This is a strange phenomenon. This article gives a very good explanation of why this is happening. You should be a brave heart to understand it though. A background in forex transactions will make it easily understandable.
• City Skyline of India 2008-09
• This is a report prepared by a company called Indicus Analytics. What it reveals is that those Indian cities which are witnessing a high credit growth also fuel a consumer boom
• In a global economic slowdown scenario and far from moderate credit growth in India, this credit and consumer market growth linkage may be a harbinger of good news for the Indian economy. Even though the contours of India’s GDP growth over the past 2-3 years have shifted to investment-led growth, domestic consumption continues to be a major pillar of the economy.
• Look at this graphic for some details.
• One more terrorist attack and one more news conference later, we come up with one more excellent piece for our exam sake
• While the words that are penned in today's ET editorial are worth an excerpt for the sake of your learning, the impunity and regularity with which the terrorists are able to strike right in the capital of the country did leave me appalled. Anyway, the following excerpt is for your keeps; because it makes an excellent piece for expressing your opinion in an essay.
  
• Community policing, which can be rather effective in containing terrorism, will not deliver unless Muslim estrangement is redressed. The failure of the system to deliver just retribution to perpetrators of pogroms such as the post-Godhra massacre of 2002 has reinforced this sense of alienation. Security forces and intelligence agencies must, of course, be made more accountable. But that cannot be achieved without a transformation of polity. Terrorism is as much a product of the sangh parivar's divisive identity politics as the illiberal ideology of extreme pan-Islamism. Soft-target attacks only helps the votaries of vengeful Hindutva and Islamists to extend their ideological sway. The BJP's demand for special anti-terror laws, which would clearly reinforce regressive, anti-democratic prejudices within the law and order machinery of the Indian state, has underscored the systemic kinship between those two forms of extremism. It is time a concerted offensive was launched to isolate and exterminate such noxious tendencies from the body politic of India.
• Debate about Minimum ceilings on public holdings in listed companies
• A few days ago we noted that the Government is contemplating fixing a minimum percentage of public holding in listed companies for various reasons. Remember the reasons? You can look at them here. Are there any issues that need to be addressed while considering this proposal? Look at the following excerpt; it's worth our read:
• One, exactly what constitutes public holding? A lot of equity in Indian companies is locked up with institutional investors. Therefore, even when public holding is high, the free-float may still be low. So instead of fixing a limit for public holding, it may be a good idea to make free-float the relevant benchmark.
  
• Two, should the law apply retrospectively to companies that have listed with lower limits? Forcing a company to raise capital when it does not need funds or promoters to dilute equity after allowing them to list with lower public float is not justified. Issue of fresh equity changes the capital structure of a company apart from leaving unproductive cash on balance sheet which it may not need. This would harm the interest of existing shareholders. A uniform minimum 25% limit should apply to new listings. The companies that have listed under relaxed norms could be incentivised to increase their public shareholding.
• Here is a positive article on the Indo US nuclear agreement and what India should be looking for in the post agreement scenario:
• India requires two types of nuclear transfers: (i) natural uranium for its PHWR programme and (ii) import of light water reactor (LWR) reactors and fuel for these imported reactors. In negotiating for both of these items, India will have to make sure that the 123-like agreements for nuclear cooperation with these suppliers incorporate following features: (i) No requirement of any suspension of cooperation in the event of an Indian nuclear test using its own material; (ii) Fuel supply assurance for transferred reactors; (iii) No formal denial of any sensitive technology, i.e., enrichment or reprocessing technology, especially the latter; and (iv) the right of reprocessing of spent fuel derived from the use of transferred material or facilities.
• Though it is the agreement with the US that has gained India an approval from the NSG and IAEA, it quite likely that the two countries that will be first benefiting from Indian nuclear commerce are Russia and France.
• With articles like these coming out of is pen, can we afford to miss reading Alok Sheel?
• Though he comes of as an economic historian to me, the pieces that he pens are so relevant for the current day challenges and themes. More so with one of my favourite themes being reforming the Left in India. In spite of being there on the political firmament for more than 60 years, why is that the Left not able to pose any serious challenge to the other political parties in getting a major mindshare of the Indian polity? Read this excellent piece; you will understand. But some excerpts for our keeps:
• Given its poor record in poverty alleviation, universal health care and literacy, and the absence of any social security net, the ‘socialist’ epithet in the Constitution notwithstanding, India’s development experience, as Amartya Sen keeps reminding us, has focused more on ‘means enhancing’ rather than on ‘means usage’. In this respect the core Left critique of Indian ‘capitalism’ is spot on. The problem, however, lies in the mechanisms advocated for ‘means enhancement’, for it seems to have learnt little from global experience, including that of other socialist countries like China, in harnessing the forces of market globalisation to increase the size of the cake. (Ironically, communists were amongst the earliest globalisers before they settled for ‘socialism in one country’.) The Indian Left needs to evolve into some kind of western social democracy to constitute a serious mainstream political challenge.
• What is green GDP?
• Value of the resources degraded or polluted in the process of economic expansion will be used as a deflator on the real GDP to arrive at the country’s green GDP.
• Environmental economists had earlier pointed out knowing the green GDP is essential since industrial growth depleting natural resources is not desirable.
• India is following a general framework of integration of environmental and economic accounting –– introduced by the United Nations five years back –– that can be used for macro planning. For guiding sustainable models, the United Nations had presented a general framework of integration of environmental and economic accounting in 2003.
• Toronto International Film festival
• At the 33rd Toronto International Film Festival Briton Danny Boyle’s ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ was chosen as this year’s best picture.
• Sure; Okay. But why do we care?
• Because it has got an India connection. Bollywood megastar Anil Kapoor, appeared in his first Englishlanguage role. The film is scripted by Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty) and inspired by Vikas Swarup’s novel Q & A.
• The film follows a poor boy’s rise to fortune as an unlikely contestant on an Indian version of the hit television game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire, with the eccentricities of life in Mumbai’s slums as a backdrop.
• Saina Nehwal does India proud
• She dished out a dazzling performance in Sinjhuang City, Taiwan, to demolish Li Ya Lydia Cheah of Malaysia 21-8, 21-19 in the summit clash of the Chinese Taipei Open Grand Prix Gold championship on Sunday.