Agriculture
Surplus foodgrains -- Fodder for hunger
AT THE height of the Soviet Union's glory, Prime Minister A. N. Kosygin received the then Foreign Minister, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, at Moscow.
Banking and Finance
Nudging interest rates down, electronically
THE Fed did it. Now every industry association in India wants the Government and the Reserve Bank of India to get interest rates down. At a pre-Budget consultation meeting early this month, the Finance Minister, Mr Yashwant Sinha, urged heads of financia
l institutions to lower their transaction costs so that interest rates could go down with them. He did not elaborate on how they could contrive the drop.
Economy
No sandbanks here
Illegal sand mining is rampant in the Chaliyar river, Kerala.
Editorial
Not by fiat alone
THE CHANGES PROPOSED by the Securities and Exchange Board of India to the regulatory framework of listed companies for enhanced corporate governance are unlikely to achieve their purpose unless there is a genuine change in promoter mindset. SEBI's set of
dos and don'ts on corporate governance envisages a commitment from the company on compliance as a pre-condition for listing with a monitoring mechanism put in place at the stock exchanges. But this may not have much of an impact as it relies excessivel
y on the moral pressure of disclosure of certain operational facets of managerial performance.
Miscellaneous
Civil society
I HAD a taste of the factors working against the civil society making any kind of an impact on public consciousness when I recently tried to mobilise several voluntary organisations of Tamil Nadu to rally against the savage murders of two village women a
ctivists of Bheemanthoppu village in Thiruvallore district who had taken a stand against illicit arrack distillation. All the weaknesses militating against properly coordinated action surfaced in no time.
Film gangsters
Lately, Bollywood's problems have been making news, and I thought I had better interview Burra Shekel. Burra is Chota's younger brother but he is called Burra because he is bigger than Chota. As the cops have not yet found Chota, Burra is safe for the mo
ment. He hangs around Mumbai's five-star hotels and spends lavishly, mostly entertaining politicians.
Politics
Bush administration: The tasks ahead
ON January 20, when Mr George Walker Bush takes oath as the forty-third President of the United States of America, he may not just promise to preserve and protect the American Constitution but, more significantly, aim to ``reconcile and unite'' a nation
divided by the bitter and divisive legal battles that characterised the Presidential election of 2000. Events in the long-drawn-out poll have, for the first time, brought into the open serious flaws in the American electoral process.
Power
Power politics -- Time to free the SEBs
THE `Black Tuesday' of January 2, 2001, when eight North Indian States, including the capital, were plunged into darkness due to a power failure at dawn, and the subsequent power shutdown for several days only highlighted the dismal state of affairs in t
he power sector. Post-crisis, the Union Power Minister, Mr Suresh Prabhu, conceded that power generation was lower by a massive 15,000 MW on that day, the loss being estimated at Rs 125 crore.
