25.04.2009

Not much to note from papers today.  The few that are worth our attention:

Finance & Economy

• Spectrum allocation issue

• India could move to an internationally-accepted auction-based system for issuing additional radio spectrum to existing mobile operators, abandoning a controversial practice of allocating the scarce national resource based on companies’ subscriber numbers. 
  
• A committee set up by the government last year to resolve the vexed issue of additional spectrum allocation is coming around to a consensus view that an auction-based system has much greater merit than the present practice.  Currently, operators using the dominant GSM technology get 6.2 MHz of spectrum each while those using the rival CDMA standard get 5 MHz per player. GSM operators can have a maximum of 15 Mhz spectrum, while for CDMA players the limit is 7.5 Mhz. 
  
• India is the only country that allocates spectrum based on subscriber numbers, and the practice has led to charges that several Indian mobile operators inflate subscriber numbers to corner the resource. 
  
• This report gives an excellent briefing on the tortuous course the spectrum allocation issue has taken since 2007.  Take a look. 
  
• Banks to be mandated to throw open the accounts of its account holders to auditors
• Banking and market regulators are considering a proposal authorising auditors to directly verify financial information of their clients with banks where they hold accounts. 
  
• Currently, rules of the Institute of Chartered Accounts of India require auditors to physically verify the cash and bank balances of companies they audit, and not merely rely on statements provided by the company secretary or the chief financial officer. However, banks are currently under no legal obligation to share such information with auditors. 
  
• This move comes in the wake of the Satyam scandal wherein the firm allegedly supplied incorrect information to its auditors about available cash balances by forging the letterhead of one of its banks.

International

• Convention on Protection of the World Cultural Heritage
  
• This UN convention was signed in 1972.  The convention recognizes about 850 sites all over the world as World Heritage sites and protects them.
  
• Director General of UNESCO: Koichiro Matsuura
  

Language lessons

• felicity: Noun
• Pleasing and appropriate manner or style (especially manner or style of expression); State of well-being characterized by emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy
  
• eg: ...southern India has a happy felicity of actually producing real agendas in the form of people associated with the film world.