26.12.2009

Politics & the Nation

• How should higher education be organized in the country?
• Take a look at this ET op-ed story. Pankaj Jalote offers a very good model. In the process he lets us onto understanding the difference between private and corporate education:
• In the higher education field, privatisation and corporatisation are actually quite different. Privatisation is regarding who controls the educational institute and the role of government in the management and funding of the institute, while corporatisation is about making profits. To make this distinction clear, universities may be classified as: public (i.e., those that are supported by government and are assumed to be not-for-profit), private notfor-profit, and private for-profit. The two types of private roles can have different purposes in higher education.
• The US is the leader in the diversity of models it allows. There are about 650 public institutes that offer four-year degrees, 1,500 private not-for-profit institutes, and about 500 private for-profit institutes. It should be pointed out that all the marquee names that are quoted in support of privatisation of higher education — MIT, Stanford, CalTech, other Ivy League Universities — are all private not-for-profit.

Finance & Economy

• WorldSpace goes bust
  
• WorldSpace satellite radio service is saying it will be discontinuing its operations in India at the end of this year. This follows WorldSpace India’s parent company filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the US in 2008. The filings did not cover Indian operations and executives said at the time the service would continue uninterrupted. That was not to be.
• Consumers who have paid up for services beyond December 2009 stand to lose their money or patiently wait for bankruptcy proceedings in the US to untangle claims.
• In India WorldSpace has about 4.5 lakh subscribers who have been paying it Rs. 1800/- per annum for availing the service. Reportedly this is 90% of the subscriber base worldwide for the service.
• WorldSpace operated 36 channels with a wide range of genres, including regional language music. Channels such as Maestro (western classical), Riff (jazz) and Orbit (classic rock) were hugely popular. There is no other similar service in India.
• Stats on cybercrime
• According to McAfee’s 2009 state of the net survey, cybercriminals have siphoned $8 billion from consumers in the past two years.
• On tax to GDP ratio in our country
• India has a tax-to-GDP ratio of 11% at the central government level and about 16% including state and municipal taxes. This is well below the average 35.8% for OECD countries in 2007.
• Tax reforms are aimed at increasing compliance and widening the tax base by lowering rates and removing exemptions. The government is hoping to redraft the new code quickly so that it can be placed in Parliament in the Budget session itself.
• China set to overtake Japan as the second largest economy
• China raised its 2008 growth estimate to 9.6% from 9% and said this year’s quarterly figures will increase, narrowing the gap with Japan, the world’s second-biggest economy.
• Gross domestic product was 31.405 trillion yuan ($4.6 trillion) last year. In comparison, Japan's GDP is estimated to be $4.9 trillion. China’s expansion will be more than 8% in 2009, according to government officials, and the nation is poised to overtake Japan next year, International Monetary Fund projections show.

International

• India's status as world's back office is under threat
• India is defined as the “world’s back office”, much like neighbouring China, which has been immortalised as the “world’s factory”. But that may be changing.
• The Philippines is fast upstaging India’s back office supremacy, with BPO service providers and customers seeming to favour the Pacific Ocean nation as a better place for “voice-related” work, the mainstay of the global outsourcing business.
• India has reportedly lost tens of thousands of jobs to the Philippines. The calibre of English is better and companies don’t have to put up with the mess (that exists in India) there,” says Pramod Bhasin, president & CEO of Genpact, India’s largest BPO company. The “mess” that Mr Bhasin refers to includes arranging transport for employees, security, power backup in offices, basic infrastructure that companies can take for granted in the Philippines and adds to costs in India.
• Industry players reckon that India could have lost around 100,000 call centre jobs to the Philippines, although with annual revenues of $11 billion, India is still the largest player in the BPO sector, more than double of the Philippines’ $5 billion.
• Take a look at how Japan is attempting a shift in its policy on Afghanistan
• Is there something in it for other countries to emulate? Though the jury may still be out on this one, the attempt itself is laudable.
• Japan is reportedly trying to train former Taliban to rehabilitate them into mainstream Afghan society. The aid being given by Japan will go into an initiative to provide paid vocational training to former Taliban fighters.
• Take a look at this news report to get more details.
• China jails dissident Liu Xiaobo to 11 years
• China's most prominent dissident, Liu Xiaobo, was jailed on Friday for 11 years for campaigning for political freedoms, with the stiff sentence on a subversion charge swiftly condemned by rights groups and Washington.
• Liu, who turns 54 on Monday, helped organise the “Charter 08” petition which called for sweeping political reforms, and before that was prominent in the 1989 prodemocracy protests centred on Tiananmen Square that were crushed by armed troops.
• Liu has been among the most combative critics of China’s one-Party rule. His case attracted an outcry from Western government and rights activists at home and abroad. The unusually harsh sentence drew a fresh outcry that is likely to grow.
• Liu has been a thorn in the government’s side since joining a hunger strike backing Tiananmen student protesters. He had been jailed for 20 months after 1989, spent three years at a labour camp in the 1990s and months under virtual house arrest.
• UN budget approved
• The General Assembly has adopted a two-year budget of $5.16 billion to cover the United Nations’ regular operations in 2010-2011. The budget is $300 million higher than the revised budget for 2008-2009 of $4.86 billion, which was approved last December.
• The UN’s regular budget is funded by the 192 member states based on their income.
• UN peacekeeping operations are funded separately.
• World's fastest rail journey starts operations
• The Wuhan-Guangzhou high-speed railway with the world’s fastest train journey with a 350 km-per-hour average speed, started operation on Saturday.
• Two passenger trains rolled out the Wuhan Railway Station and Guangzhou North Railway Station, cutting the 1,068.6 km journey to three hours from the previous 10 and a half hours.

Language Lessons

• soiree: Noun
• A party of people assembled in the evening (usually at a private house)
• eg: Legend has it the famed Abbasid caliph Haroun al-Rashid was one of the first to do this, with his nightly soirees to check out the lives and opinions of his subjects.
• trope: Noun
• Language used in a figurative or nonliteral sense
• set great store by someone or something: Idiom
• to have positive expectations for someone or something; to have high hopes for someone or something.
• eg: The Kelkar road-map for fiscal correction set much store by disinvestment.
• nettlesome: Adjective
• Causing irritation or annoyance; Easily irritated or annoyed
• eg: Finally, there is Obama, who effectively abandoned a systematic course of action under the UN framework, because it was proving nettlesome to US power and domestic politics.
• pesky: Adjective
• Causing irritation or annoyance
• eg: Obama’s decision to declare a phoney negotiating victory undermines the UN process by signalling that rich countries will do what they want and must no longer listen to the “pesky” concerns of many smaller and poorer countries.