Politics & the Nation
- Rosaiah in trouble over land scam
- At a time when the Congress is battling charges of turning a blind eye to corruption, a Hyderabad local court’s directive to the Andhra Pradesh government’s anti-corruption bureau (ACB) to register a case against former chief minister K Rosaiah and 16 other persons for their alleged involvement in a landscam in the state Capital is expected to make things difficult for the ruling party in the coming days.
- Rosaiah has come under scanner following allegations by a group of petitioners that nine acres of land, located in Ameerpet, Hyderabad, was handed over to a private party by him when he was the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh. The plot of land, which was in the custody of the state government, was said to be worth 200 crore.
- The petition against Rosaiah and others has been filed by an advocate, Mohanlal, in the ACB court in Hyderabad. The court had on Monday directed the bureau to submit a report on the subject before January 28.
- UP goes one-up on Kerala in emigrant race
- A demographic shift is underway in India, and it has the potential to affect economies of several states.
- Kerala, which used to send the maximum number of people abroad for work, has been quietly dislodged from the top slot by Uttar Pradesh.
- Uttar Pradesh sent 1.25 lakh people for work abroad in 2009 as against 1.19 lakh that took the flight out of Kerala, according to the ministry of overseas Indian affairs. The trend continued in 2010 with UP registering 68,375 emigrants till June, compared with Kerala’s 45,278.
- Foreign remittances, or cash sent by relatives working abroad, make up about a quarter of Kerala’s economy. The state was the biggest contributor to the $55 billion India received in remitted money in 2010, the most by any country in the world.
- According to the 2001 census, UP is India’s most populous state with 166.2 million people, of which 31.15% live below the poverty line. The state’s rate of population growth is 25.8%, as against the national average of 21.3%. UP ranks 26th in literacy rate among 30 states and union territories surveyed.
- Kerala, which is home to 31.84 million people, is counted among the prosperous Indian states with only 12.72% of its population below the poverty line.
- Why is a social audit of the MGNREGA preferable to the audits by CAG?
- MGNREGA is an example of transiting from welfare plans to rights-based entitlements. This challenges the challenges the conventional grammar of account-based audits that look mainly at expenditure, conformity to rules and classificatory heads.
- As the law (MGNREGA) is for the very poor, for whom time is critical since the work to be given in 15 days and wages paid in 15 days serve as the lifeline to stay off debt and starvation, then a post-event indictment will not suffice.
- In a rights-based law, not only outcomes but the processes of exercise of rights are central concerns as they determine the nature of outcomes and determine accountability for decisions taken. Legal rights are vested in individuals. A sample check of some individual’s records cannot safeguard or verify the rights of other individuals, nor can the findings of a sample be generalised or applied to other individuals. The only way the exercise of rights and the implementation of corresponding legal guarantees can be regularly and universally scrutinised is through a system that audits processes concurrently at their level of incidence. The CAG audit, in its conventional form, cannot do this. Such an audit is possible only by the local community that is most equipped with to assess because it has the most powerful tool for such interrogation — local knowledge and historical memory which defy the best government records.
- A very good definition of defence offsets
- Defence offsets are arrangements between a national government and a foreign arms supplier to direct some benefits of the contract back into the purchasing country as a condition of sale.
- Know what are inflation indexed bonds?
- Take a look at this very good ET in the Classroom column.
- Multi-layered subsidiaries to stay
- Multi-layered subsidiaries are subsidiaries of subsidiaries. These are in the news because of the country's attempt to tackle the post Satyam scam scenario.
- A maze of subsidiaries makes it difficult for investors to figure out financial transactions, allowing companies to divert funds. This was highlighted by the Satyam scandal where investigators found it difficult to track the flow of money from the scam-hit firm.
- In a submission to the parliamentary standing committee on finance that reviewed the Companies Bill 2009, the corporate affairs ministry had mooted the idea that subsidiary companies should not have further subsidiaries.
- Details of the new provision will be spelled out in the reworked Companies Bill that the government expects to get passed in the budget session of Parliament beginning February.
- The parliamentary panel headed by Yashwant Sinha had raised concerns over the incidence of corporate delinquency. Its report, released in August this year, had sought additional measures, saying the Bill stopped short of addressing the issue.
- Corporates, however, opposed the proposal saying the restriction would undermine their competitiveness as multi-layer subsidiaries are necessary to support activities like M&As and joint ventures.
- An expert committee on Company Law, led by JJ Irani, also cautioned against restrictions on corporate structuring.
- India to get another index to record price movement
- India is set to launch the PPI (Producer Price Index) soon. The ministry of industry has set up an internal committee to prepare a framework for the new index. The committee has commissioned studies to arrive at a commodity basket for the PPI. The process could take a couple of years despite a reasonably good wholesale price index (WPI), considered a proxy to the PPI.
- The PPI measures changes in prices received by domestic producers of goods and services over time. This is different from the retail price paid by consumers that include logistics costs, taxes and other levies. It will give an account of the economy’s efficiency in transferring goods and services from the producer to the consumer, who could be the final consumer or another producer using it as an input.
- India has five gauges of inflation, measuring prices from the wholesale level to the retail level. The WPI is the most widely followed index for inflation and there are four consumer price indices. The WPI measures prices recorded in bulk transactions, while the consumer price indices measure prices paid by the consumer. The current WPI series was launched in September this year with 2004-05 as the base year.
- Once the PPI is in place, there would not be any need for the WPI.
- The US had converted its wholesale price index into a producer price index in 1978.
- redux: Adjective
- brought back; revived
- eg: Gujjar agitation, redux
- epistle: Noun
- A letter; A poem or other literary work in the form of a letter or series of letters; A book of the New Testament in the form of a letter from an Apostle; An extract from an Epistle (or another New Testament book not a Gospel) that is read in a church service
- dank: Adjective
- Disagreeably damp, musty, and typically cold
- eg: Imagine that letter being enveloped by the gloom of some dank pigeonhole in the GPO ...
- subaltern: Adjective
- Of lower status; (of a proposition) Implied by another proposition (e.g., as a particular affirmative is by a universal one), but not implying it in return
- eg: The private tutor was a recognized subaltern part of the bourgeois family
- cleave: Verb
- Stick fast to; Adhere strongly to (a particular pursuit or belief); Become very strongly involved with or emotionally attached to (someone)
- eg: Part of why we cleave to sports is that excellence is so measurable.
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