Indian Current Affairs: 27.09.2008

This year's theme is: Tourism Responding to the Challenge of Climate Change and global warming. The host country is Peru
Since 1980, September 27 is celebrated by the World Tourism Organization as World Tourism Day. It was established at the Third Session of the UNWTO General Assembly in Torremolinos, Spain, in September of 1979.
The purpose of this day is to display awareness that tourism is vital to the international community and to show how it affects the social, cultural, political and economic values worldwide. September 27 is important since on that day in 1970, the Statutes of the WTO were adopted. The adoption of the statutes is considered to be a milestone in global tourism.
Want to know more about it? Read this.

Wall Street suffers fresh blow as Washington Mutual collapses; JPMorgan buys bank’s assets for $1.9 b

The US suffered the biggest ever bank failure in its history, with Washington Mutual, better known as WaMu, collapsing on Thursday.
WaMu, the largest savings and loan institution and fourth largest bank in the US was seized by regulators and delivered into the hands of JP Morgan Chase. Under the government-brokered deal, JPMorgan will pay $1.9 billion to the banking regulator and acquire all insured and uninsured deposits, assets and some liabilities of WaMu’s banking operations, including its mortgage portfolio. The government had no choice. Shares in WaMu, with its large exposure in home mortgages, credit cards and other retail lending products had become almost worthless in the past few months. As retail depositors’ fears grew, people began to withdraw money, forcing the Office of Thrift Supervision, WaMu’s main regulator in the US fractured regulatory system, to close it down.
In the US, where over 600,000 jobs have been lost this year and 9.4 million people are estimated to be currently looking for employment

He is starting to look a little more like this century’s incarnation of John Pierpont Morgan. Morgan, who established the original JP Morgan in 1871, organised a rescue of the banking system in the Panic of 1907. More than 100 years later, Dimon is buying failed banks in the midst of financial chaos.
The parallel is far from perfect. Dimon’s rescues are first and foremost meant to be good deals for shareholders, and not necessarily noble efforts to stabilise the financial world.

Don't mistake my coverage of the financial crisis as our schadenfreude over US troubles. We are genuinely concerned that it will negatively impact us. More often than not we will not be able to know what negative impact is going to hurt us in such situations.

The third IIM Review Committee was constituted under the chairmanship of R C Bhargava, the earlier two being H P Nanda Committee (1979) and Dr V Kurien Committee (1991).

The issue of autonomy of IIMs was distinctly touched upon by the Kurien Committee. The committee had stated that “IIMs need greater autonomy”. In that direction, the committee had, inter alia, recommended as follows:
• The chairman of the board should be appointed by the government of India on the recommendation of the board.
• The director’s appointment should be by the board and not by the government.
The HP Nanda Committee had, inter alia, recommended that the chairman of the board should be one who is a successful manager with proven commitment and interest in organisations, distinguished academic with administrative experience, or an administrator with experience in educational management, who is committed to the furtherance of management education and research and has adequate time to spare.
IIMs have been registered as societies, and per their MoAs, these are autonomous institutions governed by their respective boards, comprising chairman (invariably a corporate leader) and members including government officials and corporate representatives, but essentially all nominees of the government. You may note from the composition of the IIM boards that the character of the board will much depend on the character of the chairman. Only an independent and autonomous chairman, though appointed by the MHRD, will be able to hold the institute autonomous.

THE department of telecom (DoT) has made significant changes in the mobile number portability (MNP) norms to allow customers move between GSM and CDMA services provided by the same operator.
As per the earlier norms, customers could move to a different operator and retain their number. But following the amendment, a customer will now be allowed to shift to different technology platform offered by his own operator and still retain his mobile number.

EVEN as the world economy goes through the worst credit crunch in recent history, domestic lending companies have been able to buck the trend, clocking impressive growth. While the global loans volumes saw a decline of 45% on a year-on-year basis (January 1-September 24), domestic rupee-denominated loans registered a growth of 78%, attaining its highest by beating all previous full-year volumes.
According to Thomson Reuters, while America and Europe saw a decline of 51% and 48% in their loan volumes respectively, India had only a marginal impact with the total syndicated loans dipping only 2.3%.
You might have noticed a phrase "high cost economy" that I often use while describing our economy. Look at this figure; you will appreciate what I mean easily.

NPS is a defined contribution scheme, in which the three pension fund managers — SBI Pension Fund, UTI Pension Fund and LIC Pension Fund — will manage the corpus, according to investment guidelines laid down by PFRDA.
The scheme is based on defined contributions unlike the present system where the pension benefits are based on a formula linked to the last-drawn pay.
NPS now covers all central government employees who joined service on or after January 1, 2004. Last month, finance minister P Chidambaram had announced that the finance ministry had advised the pension regulator to open up NPS to private citizens also.
The corpus at present stands at Rs 1,500 crore, but this is likely to rise to as much as Rs 6,000 crore in the next six months, when 21 state governments are expected to transfer their pension funds to NPS.

Indian Current Affairs