|
|
|
|
`China economy to grow 9.5 percent in 2010` !China`s economy is likely to grow 9.5 percent in 2010, topping last year`s expected figure, a leading state think tank said in a report.Source: Zee News : Business | 1 Jan 2010 | 5:31 am Wall St closes out 2009 with best gains since 2003!US stocks ended 2009 on Thursday with their best gains since 2003, driven by optimism about the economy`s recovery and a brighter outlook for profits.Source: Zee News : Business | 1 Jan 2010 | 5:31 am Time Warner Cable, Fox at impasse; blackout looms!About 13 million Time Warner Cable Inc subscribers were to lose most Fox programming at midnight on Thursday unless the cable service provider reached a last-minute deal to pay fees to News Corp to broadcast the shows.Source: Zee News : Business | 1 Jan 2010 | 5:31 am Posco gets clearance to build $12 bn steel plant in Orissa - Hindustan Times
Source: Business - Google News | 1 Jan 2010 | 3:23 am Gold prices fall by Rs125 on global cues, subdued demandMarketmen said fresh selling by stockists at existing higher levels amid weakening global trend mainly pulled down both gold and silver prices.Source: Daily News & Analysis: Money News | 1 Jan 2010 | 3:13 am November exports up 18.2 pct y/y to $13.2 blnNEW DELHI (Reuters) - India's exports rose an annual 18.2 percent in November to $13.2 billion, the first rise after 13 straight months of decline indicating a partial recovery, the government said on Friday.Source: Reuters: Money News | 1 Jan 2010 | 3:01 am China factories boom in December 2009A survey showed the rapid pace of activity pushed up prices of inputs such as labour, raw materials and capital to a 17-month high in China.Source: Daily News & Analysis: Money News | 1 Jan 2010 | 2:49 am Rupee little moved in thin New Year tradeMUMBAI (Reuters) - The rupee continued to trade in a very narrow band on Friday afternoon in the absence of any triggers with most world markets shut for the New Year.Source: Reuters: Money News | 1 Jan 2010 | 2:40 am Rupee little moved in thin New Year trade - Economic Times
Source: Business - Google News | 1 Jan 2010 | 2:40 am Ford India posts 3% sales growth in 2009Sales growth, on a year-on-year basis, in the third and fouth quarters, stood up by 23 and 22% respectively.Source: Daily News & Analysis: Money News | 1 Jan 2010 | 2:35 am Nov exports up 18.2% y-o-yNew Delhi: India’s exports rose an annual 18.2% in November to $13.2 billion, the first rise after 13 straight months of decline, the government said on Friday. Imports dropped 2.6% from a year earlier to $22.88 billion. The trade deficit shrunk to $9.69 billion in November from $12.33 billion a year earlier. Exports for April-November, the first eight months of the 2009-10 fiscal year, were down 22.3% at $104.25 billion from the same period in the previous year. Source: LatestNews-Home - Livemint.com | 1 Jan 2010 | 2:33 am November exports up 18.2% year-on-year: GovtImports dropped 2.6% from a year earlier to $22.88 billion. The trade deficit shrunk to $9.69 billion in November from $12.33 billion a year earlier.Source: Daily News & Analysis: Money News | 1 Jan 2010 | 2:31 am POSCO gets forest land approval for Orissa plantThe steel maker needs about 4,000 acres (1,600 hectares) of land for its project in Orissa, of which 2,900 acres is forested.Source: Daily News & Analysis: Money News | 1 Jan 2010 | 2:29 am COMMODITIES - Biggest gains in 36 years; copper, sugar leadNEW YORK/LONDON (Reuters) - Commodities on Thursday sealed their biggest annual gain since the 1973 oil crisis, with most markets lifted by a mix of an unexpectedly quick demand recovery, some supply anxiety and a falling dollar.Source: Reuters: Money News | 1 Jan 2010 | 2:26 am Yamaha sales jump 60% in 2009In 2009, it introduced new motorcyles - the 150cc FZ 16 and the Yamaha Fazer in the premium segment and appointed actor John Abraham as its brand ambassador.Source: Daily News & Analysis: Money News | 1 Jan 2010 | 2:22 am Gold ends at $1,096.20, up 24.8 percent in 2009NEW YORK (Reuters) - Gold prices sealed their biggest yearly gain in three decades with a small advance on Thursday, rising for an unprecedented ninth consecutive year as dollar-hedging traders and central banks joined the rally even as safe-haven buying subsided.Source: Reuters: Money News | 1 Jan 2010 | 2:20 am All Nippon mulls taking JAL's overseas flights - paperTOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese airline All Nippon Airways is considering taking over the international routes of struggling rival Japan Airlines Corp, the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper said on Friday.Source: Reuters: Money News | 1 Jan 2010 | 2:17 am Rupee little moved in thin New Year tradeMumbai: The Indian rupee continued to trade in a very narrow band on Friday afternoon in the absence of any triggers with most world markets shut for the New Year. At 2:50pm, the partially convertible rupee was at Rs46.62/63 per dollar, weaker than Rs46.53/54 at close on Thursday. It has traded in a narrow Rs46.60-65 band so far during the session and dealers said it was unlikely to break out of the band during the session. With Asian markets and the local stock market shut, trading is expected to remain quiet through the day. The dollar rose to its highest level in more than three months against the yen on Thursday after data showed US jobless claims fell to their lowest since mid-2008, affirming optimism about the economy. In 2009, foreign portfolio buying of more than $17 billion of domestic stocks helped the rupee rise 12.2% from a record low of Rs52.2 hit in early March. The rupee gained 4.7% last year. In the currency futures market, the most traded near-month contracts on the National Stock Exchange and MCX-SX were quoting at 46.7050 and 46.7075 respectively, with the total traded volume on the two exchanges at about $1.1 billion. Source: Home - Livemint.com | 1 Jan 2010 | 2:13 am TVS sales rise 34% in DecemberThe company reported a net sales of 1.19 lakh units in December 2009 against 89,285 units a year ago.Source: Daily News & Analysis: Money News | 1 Jan 2010 | 1:53 am BSE, NSE, bullion market close for New Year holidayThe Bombay Stock Exchange, the National Stock Exchange and bullion market are closed on Saturday on account of 'New Year' holiday.Source: India Business News | Business News - Times of India | 1 Jan 2010 | 1:27 am Indian exports grow 18.2 % in November - NetIndian
Source: Business - Google News | 1 Jan 2010 | 12:33 am TVS sales rise 34 pc in Dec - Economic Times
Source: Business - Google News | 1 Jan 2010 | 12:25 am For investors, 2009 was easy. Now comes 2010LONDON (Reuters) - For some people, investing in 2009 was easy -- just put your money into oversold riskier assets and watch them rise. It looks like 2010 could be a lot more difficult, requiring selection and market timing to bring in the best results.Source: Reuters: Money News | 1 Jan 2010 | 12:24 am Fox, Time Warner Cable ink deal to avoid blackoutFox will be hurt by a loss in advertising dollars if more than 13 million homes are not able to see its shows.Source: Daily News & Analysis: Money News | 1 Jan 2010 | 12:05 am Rupee slips on dollar's rise; trade thinAt 10am (0430 GMT) the partially convertible rupee was at 46.6061 per dollar, weaker than 46.5354 at close on Thursday.Source: Daily News & Analysis: Money News | 1 Jan 2010 | 12:03 am Washington, DC sues AT&T over calling cardsThe suit claims that AT&T should turn over unused balances on the calling cards of consumers whose last known address was in Washington, DC, and have not used the calling card for three years.Source: Daily News & Analysis: Money News | 1 Jan 2010 | 12:00 am Taro shareholders vote against promoter groupDrug-maker Sun Pharmaceutical can now hope for a new dawn to break over its cross-country, litigation-riddled, $454-million effort to acquire Israeli generic-drugs maker Taro Pharmaceutical IndustriesSource: Business Line - Home Page | 1 Jan 2010 | 12:00 am Number portability put off to March 31The Government on Thursday said that the implementation of Mobile Number Portability (MNP) has been put off to MarchSource: Business Line - Home Page | 1 Jan 2010 | 12:00 am High potato, pulses prices push food inflation to 19.83%India's food price inflation rose 19.83 per cent in the 12 months to December 19, more than double the annual increase of 9.38 per cent seen on the same date lastSource: Business Line - Home Page | 1 Jan 2010 | 12:00 am Equities prove a good bet in 2009An investor who bought a basket of either the Sensex or the Nifty stocks on December 31, 2008, could have got returns of around 80 per cent after 12Source: Business Line - Home Page | 1 Jan 2010 | 12:00 am Air India's plan to cut wages, flights may run into rough weatherAir India's plans of reducing salaries of employees could run into rough weather, with sections of the employees opposing theSource: Business Line - Home Page | 1 Jan 2010 | 12:00 am 2010: Yet another year of power IPOs?For the second year in a row, power sector companies were the top fund raisers in the primary market via initial public offerings (IPO). Power IPOs have raised Rs 14,400 crore via IPO route in 2009 against Rs 12,700 crore in 2008 (inclusive ofSource: Business Line - Home Page | 1 Jan 2010 | 12:00 am Rosy 2010 aheadThe dark economic and financial clouds of 2008 are gone. Armageddon seemed to be staring in the face globally. It was staved off, thanks to the sagacious interventions of Governments and central banks, which provided every dollop necessarySource: Business Line - Home Page | 1 Jan 2010 | 12:00 am Companies back at colleges for campus hiresDespite the slowdown and late commencement, campus recruitment this year is in full swing. In the last three weeks, companies have recruited over 8,000 students from various colleges in theSource: Business Line - Home Page | 1 Jan 2010 | 12:00 am Current account deficit rises marginally though trade gap narrowsThe current account deficit for July–September 2009 was marginally higher from the year-ago period despite a lower trade deficit due to the decline in net invisibleSource: Business Line - Home Page | 1 Jan 2010 | 12:00 am Infrastructure firms upbeat on prospectsInfrastructure firms are upbeat on the business prospects next year but want the Government to play a major role in accelerating the sector's growth, in terms of faster clearance of projects and by ensuring adequateSource: Business Line - Home Page | 1 Jan 2010 | 12:00 am POSCO gets forest land approval for Orissa plantBHUBANESWAR, India (Reuters) - South Korean steelmaker POSCO has received final approval to acquire forest land needed for its long-delayed $12 billion India project, a company spokesman said on Friday.Source: Reuters: Money News | 31 Dec 2009 | 11:53 pm China factories boom in DecBEIJING/SEOUL (Reuters) - China's economic growth looks set to accelerate into the new year, with booming factories driving a December manufacturing survey to a 20-month high while South Korea's exports to the country surged on strong demand.Source: Reuters: Money News | 31 Dec 2009 | 11:38 pm India to overtake China in 2020: Swaminathan Aiyar - Economic Times
Source: Business - Google News | 31 Dec 2009 | 11:05 pm Rupee falls by 7 paise in opening tradeThe rupee depreciated by 7 paise against the dollar on the first day of New Year today due to firm demand for the US currency which rose to three-month high against other major currencies.Source: HindustanTimes.com - Top Business News Headlines | 31 Dec 2009 | 11:04 pm Rupee falls by 7 paise in opening tradeThe rupee depreciated by 7 paise against the dollar on the first day of New Year on Friday due to firm demand for the US currency which rose to three-month high against other major currencies.Source: India Business News | Business News - Times of India | 31 Dec 2009 | 10:14 pm Wall St Week Ahead: New year, old worries for U.S. stocksNEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks closed out 2009 with the best performance in six years, but monthly employment figures in the first week of the new year will keep investors focused on what is likely to be 2010's reality -- the economy's struggle to recover.Source: Reuters: Money News | 31 Dec 2009 | 9:41 pm Wall Street closes out ‘09 with best gains since 2003New York: US stocks ended 2009 on Thursday with their best gains since 2003, driven by optimism about the economy’s recovery and a brighter outlook for profits. The benchmark Standard & Poor’s 500 index rose 23.5% for the year, while the Dow climbed 18.8% and the Nasdaq jumped 43.9% from its close on 31 December 2008. It was the market’s first annual advance in two years. In 2008, the S&P 500 slid 38.5% when the economic crisis led to Wall Street’s worst year since the Great Depression. For Thursday’s session alone, though, US stocks declined, with a late-day sell-off pushing all three major indexes down about 1% as investors sold some of the year’s best-performing stocks to lock in some of 2009’s substantial gains. Most of the year’s advance is the result of a nine-month rally, led by gains in technology and materials shares on expectations the economic recovery will spur capital spending and increase demand for energy, metals and other natural resources. “It really was a turnaround year,” said Charles Lieberman, chief investment officer of Advisors Capital Management, LLC in Paramus, New Jersey. “It shows how much of a recovery there’s been.” American Express, Microsoft and IBM were the Dow’s top gainers for the year. All three ended Thursday lower, however. On the other hand, General Electric, long considered a bellwether, finished second to last among the Dow components in terms of 2009 performance, with big oil producer Exxon Mobil Corp in last place. A lift from earnings Signs of an economic rebound, including more than 70% of companies beating profit expectations in the second quarter, have driven the S&P 500 up 65% since its 9 March closing low. The dollar’s weakness throughout much of 2009 also gave the market a strong boost on hopes about exports. Despite optimism about 2009, Wall Street registered its first-ever negative decade on a total return basis even with dividends reinvested. The S&P 500 is down about 10% for the decade, on that basis. After a fast sell-off late in the session, the Dow Jones industrial average ended down 120.46 points, or 1.14%, at 10,428.05. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index slid 11.32 points, or 1.00%, at 1,115.10. The Nasdaq Composite Index lost 22.13 points, or 0.97%, to close at 2,269.15. US financial markets will be closed on Friday for New Year’s Day. Winning quarter, losing week For the fourth quarter, the Dow rose 7.5%, the S&P 500 gained 5.5% and the Nasdaq jumped 6.9%. But for the week, the Dow was off 0.9%, the S&P 500 was down 0.4% and the Nasdaq fell 0.7%. The S&P 500’s top-performing stock for the year was XL Capital -- up an eye-popping 395.4% in 2009. On Thursday, however, XL Capital’s stock slipped 0.4% to end at $18.33 on the New York Stock Exchange. Citigroup, down 50.7% for the year, was among the worst performers in the S&P 500. IBM rose 55.5% for the year, Microsoft gained 56.8% in 2009 and American Express jumped 118.4%. For the day, IBM fell 1.3% to $130.90, Microsoft dropped 1.6% to $30.48 and American Express declined 0.7% to $40.52. S&P off 29% from record close Analysts see further upside in stocks in 2010 if the recovery proves sustainable. The US unemployment rate is still at 10% -- a 26-year high. The Dow is down 26% from its record closing high on 9 October 2007, while the S&P 500 is down 29% from its record close on that same date. The Nasdaq is down 55% from its 10 March 2000, closing high. A drop of 20% or more technically signifies a bear market. “I don’t think we’re overbought,” Lieberman said. Emerging markets performed better than the United States and other developed markets, with China’s key stock index ending with an 80% gain and Brazil’s stock market up 83% for the year. The S&P information technology sector is up 59.9% for the year, while the S&P materials sector is up 45.2%. Telecommunications was the worst-performing S&P 500 sector, with a gain of just 2.6% for the year, followed by utilities, up 6.8%. Adding to Thursday’s bearish tone, the December reading of the Institute for Supply Management-Chicago index, also known as the PMI or purchasing managers’ index, was revised downward from the level reported on Wednesday. Volume was light, with many investors out for the holidays. Just 679.9 million shares traded on the NYSE, well below last year’s daily closing average of 1.49 billion. On Nasdaq, about 1.27 billion shares traded, also sharply below last year’s daily average of 2.28 billion. Declining stocks outnumbered advancing ones on the NYSE by a ratio of 2 to 1, while on the Nasdaq, about 17 stocks fell for every 10 that rose. Source: Home - Livemint.com | 31 Dec 2009 | 9:04 pm Who moved my newsHere we are at the end of a decade, when the Net and new technology have transformed the face of the communication business completely. And what with political unrest in Asia and Africa growing, the wobbly markets in the West remaining wobbly, and worldwide effects of global warming, there is a lot more news being generated out there. But some quadrillions of bytes deep into the 21st century, we find that genuine information has never been more devalued. It seems that only those in need of an ideological fix or preparing for what is popularly known in the hinterlands as “competitions”, will take an interest in old-style news and editorial analysis. The rest accept the incessant chasing of “newsies” by the mainstream media, followed by SMS-based reactions from fellow consumers, as news. Could we have imagined five years ago that together with paid news, personality journalism will ensure such a full and final dumbing down of the masses? That the bytes and tweets of worthies from Narendra Modi to N.D. Tiwari, Shashi Tharoor to Salman Khan will create “breaking news” flashes, and that worrisome hard news about inflation, shortage of water and increasing terrorist threats will be discussed only in passing or not at all? That wacky items such as Narendra Modi’s latest wardrobe or Tharoor’s latest twittering or the Bigg Boss winner’s family portraits should lead the day’s news is, to put it mildly, rather disquieting. Since a vigorous public debate and exchange of information is critical to the democratic process, and the striking power of emerging technologies has made unlimited amounts of information available to its consumers, it is often argued that the media is the biggest tonic democracies such as ours have. But in an age with a huge increase in media players, while the overall news gathering costs are rising, the available revenue pie is getting divided and subdivided like never before. So a good part of the media establishment has begun to sift news and make the final news packages more advertiser-friendly. No harm in this, except that this also means at the same time that as it fills its media stockings with lots of popcorn news, the media establishment may also be keeping out lots of less congenial news as avoidable. The second step in this ad-friendly trajectory decrees that the size of readership/viewership commanded by the medium will be crucial for determining the products’ ad worthiness. And so like the political parties, in the last year the media, too, has created many new coalitions between news channels and dailies and mobile platforms. This may have created vast captive constituencies of media consumers, but it has also whipped up hysterically protectionist attitudes and melodrama in the media. The balkanization of the entire field of news also means that instead of consolidating public opinion over vital national issues (such as tackling armed insurgents or electoral malpractices), and softening extreme ideological divides by bringing every shade of national opinion on one platform, the media will foster mutually exclusive ideological groupings in its newly created constituencies. The acquisition and dissemination of news has traditionally been shaped by custom, language and certain accepted standards of professional expertise. But of late, within a sizeable part of our media, there has been a quiet bifurcation of editorial decision-making. Yes, the editor is technically still responsible for all that goes into his paper or bulletin, but the fact is the ultimate power to decide what is fit to be printed as news no longer rests entirely with him. He must share it with those in charge of marketing the “product”. This results in the “product” occasionally skipping or filtering out news less congenial to certain friendly groups. It also means that from time to time, “paid for” news packages may be quietly inserted in editorial space. Grey-haired editors of days gone by may appear more pugnacious and protective of their turf, but the fact is that the imperious editor has now been deliberately replaced with eminently reasonable guys on short-term contracts who are often more comfortable with the managerial cadres than their own editorial teams. Progress, alas, George Bernard Shaw said, ultimately depends on the “unreasonable” ones. And the media is no exception. Given certain unchanging tendencies of the human mind, the print media, if it is to survive the onslaught of the Net and the blogosphere, will need flamboyant and pugnacious visionaries at the helm. It is not the computers that bring out exciting and interesting newspapers day after day; exciting and interesting human beings do. Mrinal Pande likes to take readers behind the reported news in her fortnightly column. She is a writer and freelance journalist in New Delhi. Comment at theotherside@livemint.com Source: LatestNews-Home - Livemint.com | 31 Dec 2009 | 8:38 pm BJP criticises Centre for its flip-flop on Telangana - Economic Times
Source: Business - Google News | 31 Dec 2009 | 3:03 pm Mahindra Satyam cautiously optimistic on outlook for 2010The Satyam saga was perhaps the most extraordinary corporate story of 2009. The company witnessed a tumultuous year where it managed to claw back from the brink of disaster. Under the new ownership, it still has some while to go get back on track. CP Gurnani, CEO of Mahindra Satyam spoke on the road ahead for the company.Source: Moneycontrol Top Headlines | 31 Dec 2009 | 2:53 pm Exodus of partners not to have substantial impact: PwCFew days ago, we saw a large churn at one of Indias biggest audit firms PriceWaterhouse Coopers. Nearly 20 partners led by Senior Partner Dinesh Kanabar quit PwC and sources say most of them have joined KPMG.Source: Moneycontrol Top Headlines | 31 Dec 2009 | 2:26 pm Food inflation at 11-yr high, veggies cool - Economic Times
Source: Business - Google News | 31 Dec 2009 | 1:41 pm Jyoti Structures to consider unit\'s merger on Jan 8Jyoti Structures Ltd said on Thursday its board will meet on January 8 to consider amalgamation of its wholly owned unit JSL Structure Ltd with itself.Source: Moneycontrol Top Headlines | 31 Dec 2009 | 1:00 pm Sensex ends 2009 on new highIf 2008 was the year of surprises and heart breaks for investors on Dalal Street, 2009 would go down as the year that witnessed the wildest swings in the fortune of those who deal in stocks and shares.Source: India Business News | Business News - Times of India | 31 Dec 2009 | 12:58 pm Inflation: Non-food cos a worried lot, change strategyWith food inflation hovering around the 20% mark in December, a large share of people's regular expenditure is now devoted to food products. This has left makers of non-food products a worried lot.Source: India Business News | Business News - Times of India | 31 Dec 2009 | 12:53 pm India's debt rises 8.1% to $243 billion - Times of India
Source: Business - Google News | 31 Dec 2009 | 12:53 pm 'Basic fin discipline can grow your wealth'These days, financial resolutions like paying off credit card dues, buying adequate insurance cover, opening a SIP with a mutual fund also find a place on the new year resolution list.Source: India Business News | Business News - Times of India | 31 Dec 2009 | 12:51 pm India's debt rises 8.1% to $243 billionIndia's total external debt rose by 8.1% to $242.8 billion at the end of September 2009 from $224.6 billion at March-end 2009.Source: India Business News | Business News - Times of India | 31 Dec 2009 | 12:50 pm Taro shareholders reject re-election of the board - Times of India
Source: Business - Google News | 31 Dec 2009 | 12:48 pm Taro shareholders reject re-election of the boardIn a major boost to India's Sun Pharma, which is locked in a takeover battle with Taro, shareholders of the Israeli drug firm on Thursday rejected a proposal to re-elect directors.Source: India Business News | Business News - Times of India | 31 Dec 2009 | 12:47 pm FM sees GDP at 7.5%, negative agri growthFM Pranab Mukherjee on Thursday sounded a note of caution on the agriculture sector coming in the way of India's gross domestic product (GDP) surging 7.5% in the current fiscal.Source: India Business News | Business News - Times of India | 31 Dec 2009 | 12:45 pm Vineet Joshi | Academic interestsNew Delhi: Vineet Joshi, chairman of the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) for the past year, still struggles to find an answer to the most obvious question about his career: Trained as a mechanical engineer, how did he end up formulating education policy? Mostly, Joshi says, he ended up doing things in a rush. “I picked up things others wanted me to do,” he says. “Much of my career choices came from what the socially accepted definition of a good career was.”  The talent guide: CBSE chairman Vineet Joshi says educationists must adequately communicate that change is important and for the better. Madhu Kapparath / Mint Thus did Joshi gravitate towards the Indian Administrative Service, the much-coveted seat of bureaucracy. While working on a research project to develop high-speed cameras at IIT Kanpur, Joshi aced the exams in 1992. “It just happened. I didn’t really know what I wanted.” Two decades after he graduated from IIT and became a bureaucrat, Joshi now wants to ensure that schoolchildren choose their own careers instead of being led into something they aren’t sure about. “If that happens, you are basically sowing seeds of frustration,” he says. “One must know what one wants to do.” This explains why Joshi is currently heading one of the most significant school reforms in India: The transition of CBSE-affiliated schools from a marks-based evaluation system to grades to assess the performance of students, and the elimination of the dreaded class X board exams. This hasn’t exactly met with universal approval; many educators worry that without rigorous testing, it will become difficult to evaluate the performance of a school or even a single student. But Joshi feels that the existing system has led to the suicides of students suffering from peer pressure and an inadequate understanding of their own aspirations. For this to change, he argues that assessments have to be based on a variety of subjects and not just academics. “A student from a rural area could be good at football, whereas an urban kid could be better at English. Assessment on all fronts will help them recognize that early on in their lives.” As soon as he joined CBSE, in 2004, Joshi began working on a system of continuous and comprehensive evaluation (CCE), a format which marked a departure from the usual testing of students. Within a year, CBSE had asked its schools to launch the concept in classes IX and X; soon after Joshi took over as chairman last March, CCE was extended to all classes. “We asked schools to assess students through class projects, extra-curricular activities and other parameters, which weren’t restricted to academics alone,” Joshi says. “This will be a great equalizer when it comes to assessing first-generation learners and help in recognizing their interests and abilities right at the school level.” Much of Joshi’s focus has been on evolving policies to de-stress a student’s life. “Everyone has spoken about reducing stress among schoolchildren, but no one took it as urgently as Joshi,” says Suman Gulati, director of the Blue Bells Group of Schools, who works closely with Joshi on policy interventions. CCE is Joshi’s first step towards grades, but it is not his only priority. He is also working on a draft policy for school accreditation, a novel attempt to rank schools on the basis of quality of education. Over the last year, the board also moved the school affiliation process online. “Before this, we would get 400 applications. After this, we got 4,000.” Many of Joshi’s policy ideas seem to stem from his own experiences. His active love for sports—he represented Uttar Pradesh in national-level table tennis tournaments—led to CBSE’s effort to integrate physical education into primary school curricula. His recognition of professional courses as means of creating employment opportunities reflects in the board’s attempts to introduce vocational degrees in a variety of subjects from 2010. In some ways, Joshi remains a student himself. Besides touring schools and brainstorming with educators, Joshi never misses his own classes at the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, where he is enrolled as a part-time master’s student of business administration. “He is in tune with the times. He listens to us and understands our problems, which is why he is able to do more,” says Gulati. Joshi’s youth, in particular, has worked for him. At 41, he is one of CBSE’s youngest chairmen ever, popular with both educators and schoolchildren. At a recent conference, students waited for hours just to be photographed with him. “After five years at CBSE, no one would spearhead reforms better than him,” says Sadhna Parashar, director, CCE. “He knows the subject through and through.” Joshi insists that communicating his reform-centric policies to schools, parents and children will prove the biggest challenge. “The general tendency is to resist change. We have to adequately communicate that it is important and for the better,” he says. But after spending the 1990s on deputation in various other Union ministries, Joshi admits he has stayed with CBSE because he likes his work. “Your passion could be your profession. Education is mine.” Source: LatestNews-Home - Livemint.com | 31 Dec 2009 | 12:45 pm The year of living cautiously There’s never a dull year in South Asia, but 2009 was particularly momentous: A civil war ended in Sri Lanka; a prime minister resigned and returned to his revolutionary roots in Nepal; an embattled government fought factions of the Taliban in Pakistan; a border grew newly contentious between India and China. What lies ahead in 2010? Click here for more Click here for all Mint 2010 issue multimedia specials Source: Home - Livemint.com | 31 Dec 2009 | 12:45 pm Ram Sewak Sharma | A different drummerNew Delhi: Ram Sewak Sharma is a man in a hurry. His room in the Planning Commission building is quiet, but you can sense his excitement in the way his fingers move between tapping the keyboard, drumming on the table and gesticulating in the air. As director general of the nascent Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), Sharma is expected, over the next four years, to not only collect reliable data on 600 million Indians, but to also assign them unique numbers and ensure that state governments use these numbers in their interactions with people.  Number cruncher: UIDAI director general Ram Sewak Sharma says the Unique Identification project is the most exciting job he has ever had. Madhu Kapparath / Mint Sharma, an officer of the 1978 Indian Administrative Services batch, has one degree in math from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and another in computer science from the University of California. His technological understanding is coupled with 30 years’ worth of experience in implementing information technology (IT) in government departments, first in Jharkhand and then in Bihar. Those 30 years have prepared him for some of the challenges—technological, logistical and bureaucratic—that will lie in his new path. Indubitably, the UID project is larger than anything he’s done thus far. “It’s a challenge, I love these kinds of jobs,” he says, bouncing in his chair. “And this is the most exciting one I’ve had.” The project has many dimensions, but as far as he’s concerned, the main goal is to help the poor and marginalized. The government initiates a number of schemes for this segment, but most end up relying on inaccurate or “very inadequate” data. Consequently, the benefits of such programmes never reach their intended recipients. For their part, the poor, even when aware of these schemes, find it difficult to register for them. Data verification is long and complicated, and it has to be repeated at every involved institution. “A migrant worker in Mumbai can’t open a no-frills bank account in the city,” explains Sharma. “His documents are often not accepted by banks because they find them difficult to verify.” That’s where the UID will— hopefully—come in. Before a person is issued the number, there will be a single, thorough verification of documents. “The procedure,” says Sharma, “has been designed keeping in mind the ground realities.” The first step is the physical vetting of documents. In some circumstances, this can be substituted or augmented by an introduction-based system that relies on the testimony of other people, or even on census data. Biometric devices will link a person with her UID, reducing the possibility of fakes or duplicates in the system. The result will give migrant workers access to a wide set of services, including a bank account, with this single number. At this point in the conversation, Sharma can barely contain himself. His fingers execute a spirited march on the table. The idea is beautifully simple, yet incredibly involved. It’s too large a project to be executed solely by the small group of people at UIDAI, so they will rely on registrars—essentially government bodies such as rural development departments—for data verification. Isn’t it too ambitious? Well yes, Sharma says. But it needs to be done. In his earlier stint in Jharkhand, Sharma had faced much opposition, being transferred nine times in six years. Aren’t there chances of something similar happening in this case—if the government loses steam, for instance? “Of course that can happen. I am a civil servant and I can get transferred, but I’m doing my job,” says Sharma matter-of-factly. One thing he is assured of, however, is the backing of Nandan Nilekani, the head of UIDAI, who hand-picked him for the job. Nilekani isn’t familiar with Sharma’s work in Jharkhand but says that he came very highly recommended. “His understanding of technology is solid," he says, “and he has a lot of experience in implementation and execution. I’m extremely lucky to have him." Sharma’s former colleagues in Jharkhand also think highly of him. Shailesh Kumar Singh, the current information technology secretary in the state, says that Sharma’s applications have continued to be “extremely useful, and have absolutely no shortcomings.” Some of these applications, such as the treasury management information system, have now moved beyond what, in Gladwellian tone, Sharma calls the “tipping point”. “They’ve become too widespread, too commonly used...too many people have seen their benefits, for the government or any other agency to be able to go back on them,” he says proudly. So where—after how many months, or after how many numbers issued—does Sharma see a similar tipping point for the UID programme? “The day we are able to effectively demonstrate to the common man that having a UID can make life easier,” he says, “is when we will reach that point of irreversibility.” By now, the drumming has reached a crescendo, which is as clear a signal as any. The symphony is over; it’s time to get back to work. Source: LatestNews-Home - Livemint.com | 31 Dec 2009 | 12:45 pm Notes from the frontier While researching for his book, Weisman encountered numerous locations where climate change is already forcing nature to redress imbalances, leaving humanity palpably worse off. “There are examples…that show temperatures can change rather abruptly when the chemistry tips to one side or the other,” Weisman says. “Something is going to be so overloaded very quickly that parts are going to collapse. We have to be prepared for some big changes.” Click here to view a slideshow on 2010: Alan Weisman on climate change challenges.  “I’ve been to some South Pacific atolls where people live on islands that are at variable sea level. Their crops are dependent on limited fresh water, which is being endangered. If sea levels keep rising…their islands are going to get swamped. Even before that, the pressure of a rising sea will allow seawater to start invading the water table. You’re going to get saltier and saltier water, and it’ll be harder to make a living that way. Bangladeshis have been living at or below sea level for a long time. They’ve learnt various coping mechanisms—they’ve learnt to go up onto roof tops at certain times of the year. That isn’t to say they don’t have any problems. They’re going to run out of their capacity to cope, because they’re going to have to spend longer and longer waiting out floods to recede. After a while, it’s going to be impossible to maintain a food or a fresh water supply.” “Western North America is arid compared to the eastern part. Moisture is dependent on snowfall…in the mountains. The snow patch has been diminishing over the past couple of decades—measurably. We also have…vegetation that helps to retain water in the soil. There are massive forests and they’re all coming down. The forests, as they get drier, become more susceptible to bark beetles, which live in the forest, but their lifespan is usually limited by cold winters. Now, because summers are longer, the beetles have time to generate more breeding cycles. The wood is drier and cannot produce bark resin, the natural defence against these insects. (The Canadian province of) British Columbia is predicted to lose 90% of its forest by 2015. You go to Alaska and northern Mexico and places in between, and you see enormous stretches of dead forest. We may be looking at a major disaster.” Click here for all Mint 2010 issue multimedia specials Source: Home - Livemint.com | 31 Dec 2009 | 12:45 pm A new prescription New Delhi: There is, in Big Pharma’s near future, a distinct echo of the recent past. In June 2003, Pfizer Inc., the world’s biggest drug maker, was threatened by a generic drugs firm that was fast taking on the giants of the industry. Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd had challenged Pfizer’s patented, profitable monopoly on the world’s largest selling drug, Lipitor. Also See Patent Cliff (Graphic) After a five-year battle, Pfizer and Ranbaxy agreed to settle all their patent litigation worldwide involving Lipitor—the world’s most-prescribed cholesterol-lowering medicine, its sales worth $13.2 billion (Rs61,644 crore now) in September 2008-09 alone. But that seems only to have been a precursor to the challenges of 2010. In what is referred to as the “patent cliff”, starting in 2010 and running up to 2012, innovator pharmaceutical companies are set to lose billions of dollars from patent expiries of some of their hottest drugs. One estimate pegs the total loss in revenue at more than $100 billion.  “Most of the top 20 companies will be affected by the patent cliff,” says Alan Sheppard, principal (global generics) at market research firm IMS Health. “Many of the products that go off-patent now are blockbusters, which means that most generics companies will develop them... leading to heavy price erosion.” Dreaded by innovator firms, the patent cliff is an opportunity for which generics manufacturers have been preparing for the last seven years. Hard-won patent struggles will lose meaning only a few years after the victories. In 2005, Dr Reddy’s Laboratories Ltd lost a patent case against Eli Lilly & Co. over the latter’s schizophrenia drug Zyprexa, worth $2.2 billion in sales; its patent expires in 2010. Agreements painstakingly entered into, such as that between Pfizer and Ranbaxy, will also lapse. Pfizer’s basic patent on Lipitor expires in 2010, while all other patents on the product expire in 2018. In court, Pfizer had pushed for its 2018 patent to be held valid; Ranbaxy, however, had desired a 2006 launch of its generic version of Lipitor. The companies finally settled for launching the generic on 30 November 2011—a win-win situation for both. While Ranbaxy gets exclusive marketing rights for 180 days, other firms such as Lupin Ltd will wait in the wings, poised to launch their versions on Day 181. As their fingers are pried off their patents, innovator firms have often been forced to consider realignments that are nothing short of tectonic. “This patent cliff...has propelled all the innovator firms to re-evaluate their long-term growth strategy,” admits a spokesperson for Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. “Branded generic ambitions have germinated from this evaluation.” In September, for instance, Eli Lilly unveiled its new operating model. “While our financial performance during the past few years has been strong, we will soon enter the most challenging period in our company’s history,” said John C. Lechleiter, chairman and chief executive of Eli Lilly, in a press release. Lechleiter explained that this called for strong measures. Eli Lilly, which faces its own patent expirations for key products beginning late this year, will aim to reduce the time taken to get new medicines to patients to reduce its cost structure by $1 billion and lower its global headcount to 35,000 by the end of 2011. In 2008, Pfizer announced its own strategy to address the Lipitor challenge, founding its established products and emerging markets business units to tap a huge market for its off-patent products. “We already have a powerful portfolio of 380 products and more than $10 billion in annual sales in established products,” says Kelvin Cooper, senior vice-president of portfolio development in established products at Pfizer. Referring to Pfizer’s acquisition of Wyeth Ltd last year, Cooper says it will “enable us to apply science and global resources to improve health and well-being at every stage of life.” Significantly, Big Pharma has begun to enter the arena of generics, through mergers and acquisitions, or partnerships, or even alone. “All the patent extension and out-of-court settlement practices are being challenged by antitrust enforcement agencies,” observes Anand Pathak, an advocate with P&A Law Offices. “So many companies have started tying up with generics firms. But this has another aspect—if you tie up with too many generics, they will have no independent presence in the market...competition will start drying up.” Many of these generics firms are, happily, in emerging, potentially attractive markets. Nilesh Gupta, group president and executive director of Lupin cites a GlaxoSmithKline Plc deal with Dr Reddy’s “to take and distribute its products in emerging markets”. Ajit Mahadevan, a partner in Ernst and Young’s health science practice, also notes that innovators “get into authorized generics by authorizing a generics company to make their product”. While this flood of new generics will lead to heavy price erosion, experts in the industry are optimistic about the opportunities that lie ahead. The biggest thrust for innovator firms will come in biologics—blockbuster medicinal products that are biological rather than purely chemical in nature. Generics firms can then produce biosimilars, molecules that are similar to novel biologics. “Now we are looking at opportunities in diseases where there is still an unmet need and these tend to be in areas of biotechnology,” Sheppard says. “So biotech and biological is (our) next focus.” Graphic by Rahul Awasthi / Mint Source: Home - Livemint.com | 31 Dec 2009 | 12:45 pm W for wrongNew Delhi: For possibly the first time since their pre-school days, analysts across the world have been thinking deeply about the alphabet—about which letter-shaped path of recovery the world will follow out of its recession. The economy could rebound sharply, tracing a V; it could trudge along the bottom a while longer before rising slowly into a U; it could rise, fall, and rise again, as in a W. (Or, in the direst situation, the recovery may not be a recovery at all, but just an L-shaped continuation of economic misery.) But not everyone subscribes to this framework of thought. Anirvan Banerji, director of research at the Economic Cycle Research Institute in New York, tells Mint why the alphabet approach to recession analysis is the wrong one, and how he prefers to classify recessions. Inherently, what is the main problem with classifying recoveries into alphabet shapes? What sort of complexities does it elide over? Quite simply, if you actually look at the broad measures of aggregate economic activity that define recessions and recoveries, they don’t look like those letters—at best they would be Procrustean fits. For example, the Great Depression of 1929-33 saw economic activity slide steeply in 1929-30, pause for a few months from late 1930 to early 1931, and then slide steeply again until early 1933 before rebounding almost vertically for a few months, and then at a slower but still rapid pace. Also See | The Recession Alphabet (Graphics) The deep 1973-75 recession saw only a mild decline in economic activity for almost the first year of recession, but was then followed by a plunge and a sharp rebound. The 2001 recession saw a very mild decline in economic activity, then a mild rebound from late 2001 to mid-2002, followed by a flat period until mid-2003, and then a more rapid rebound. I can keep going, but given the choice among L, U, V and W, what letters would you choose to assign to those episodes? I know this alphabetical shorthand is designed to appeal to journalists, but it’s just silly. Is there an alternative classification of recoveries that you prefer? A simple classification of US recessions in the past 50 years would group them into mild recessions (as in 1960-61, 1969-70, 1980, 1990-91 and 2001) and severe recessions (as in 1973-75, 1981-82 and 2007-09). If you go back to the beginning of the 20th century, you could add three depressions (in 1907-08, 1920-21 and 1937-38) and the Great Depression (1929-33). The criteria for classification are the three Ds—depth, duration and diffusion. Once you get into the 19th century, hard data on the three Ds are more difficult to find, but the five-and-a-half-year 1873-79 depression, following the Gilded Age of excess and extravagance that Mark Twain wrote about, was surely very severe; also devastating to the then-agrarian economy was the six-year depression of 1815-21, triggered by the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia (the largest in recorded history), which spread volcanic ash particles around the globe, resulting in the ”year without a summer” in 1816, along with widespread famine. Specifically in 2010, as far as the global economy is concerned, what is the pace or structure of recovery that you see, based on trends over the past few months? The first point to note is that economists do precisely what you suggest, which is to forecast the next few months based on trends from the past few months. This works as long as the economy is proceeding in the same direction, but it is guaranteed to fail at turning points (beginnings of recessions and recoveries), because the trend itself reverses at these times. No wonder that the International Monetary Fund found, based on a 63-country study of economists’ accuracy in recession forecasting, that their “record of failure is virtually unblemished”. Not being an economist or an analyst, but a student of the business cycle, I prefer to look at good leading indexes, which correctly predicted back in April (when the talk at the London Group of Twenty meeting was of the D-word—depression) that the US recession would end this summer. Those objective forward-looking economic indicators are still pointing to a global recovery that will continue to strengthen at least through mid-2010. Because leading indicators cannot see reliably beyond that time frame, there is no good basis for predicting what will happen much beyond that, say, a year from now. Graphic by Rahul Awasthi/Mint samanth.s@livemint.com Source: Home - Livemint.com | 31 Dec 2009 | 12:45 pm Investing Outlook | The one-year planWhat the boom-bust-boom of the last four years proved, beyond a doubt, is that you need to have a plan. Those who stuck to their systematic investment plans through 2008 find that they are still making in excess of 20% a year, when they take into account five-year returns on equity. Those who sold and waited for markets to recover are now wondering if they left their return too late, as the markets are riding an around 90% return since the lowest point of 2009. The only point that the year past reinforced is this: You cannot time the market. It’s best to go in the direction you choose rather than lurch after markets and interest rates. So for those of you who do, those who still don’t have a plan—we know you’re out there!—here’s what 2010 looks like. Home loans will get more expensive; not only will the Indian interest rate cycle turn, but so will the global cycle at some point in 2010. For the first-time buyer—go for it, since it’s always a good time to buy that first house. If you’re getting a teaser home loan rate at 8-8.5%, remember that you could be looking at a minimum of 2 percentage points higher in two years; that’s Rs80,000 more a year on a loan of Rs50 lakh. The statutory warning here is against over-leveraging; so even if you are looking at a second or a third property, keep your monthly payments at less than half your disposable income, or your other investments will suffer. Rising interest rates usually work like pin pricks to a swelling stock market, so expect some sharp corrections as the interest rate cycle turns. But remember: India is on a bull run that should last two decades, as growth is yet to fully take off, and there is all of India to still build. If you are in an employer’s provident fund, have maximized your public provident fund and have up to six months of spending money in near-cash and your term and medical insurance in place, please put all the rest in equity. Start or continue with your systematic investment plans of mutual funds. Look at exchange- traded funds as the lowest cost option to riding the index. As for gold, art and unit-linked insurance plans, or Ulips: just stay away. Gold, because it may be the new oil; art, because it is unregulated and illiquid; Ulips, because the product is a high-cost trap. monika.h@livemint.com Source: Home - Livemint.com | 31 Dec 2009 | 12:45 pm Reliance Retail to open 45 books and music stores by December 2014 Mumbai: Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Retail Ltd plans to open a total of 45 stores of its books and music retailing business—Reliance TimeOut—across India over the next 3-5 years. The multi-format retailer, which operates seven stores of TimeOut, said it wants to tap India’s Rs3,500 crore book retailing industry, of which only 40% is organised. “In the next 3-5 years (or December 2014), we will have a total of 45 TimeOut outlets across four states-mainly in western and southern India. Our strategy is to first saturate a town, then a state followed by the entire region,” Reliance Retail, business head, Reliance TimeOut, Deepinder Kapany said. He said that the next couple of months will see five stores being opened in Mumbai. “The next few stores in 2010 will come up in Delhi, Ahmedabad, Mumbai and Bangalore. We want to saturate Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka and the National Capital Region (NCR),” Kapany said. This is part of an overall aggressive expansion strategy by the format, which will enter Pune, Nagpur, Hyderabad, Mysore, Mangalore, Ahmedabad, Baroda and Jamnagar. Reliance Retail will expand through the cost-effective model of revenue-sharing format with property owners. Kapany said that the TimeOut format was the ‘biggest beneficiary’ of the economic meltdown of the past year as books, music and stationary continued their sales momentum even as most lifestyle and value retailers world-over grappled with depressed sales. “This is one format which has grown. On an average day, we had footfalls of at least 4,000 to 4,500 in our Delhi and Bangalore stores respectively. Our same store sales growth has been 26% this year,” he said, but declined to reveal revenues for the format. Kapany said that TimeOut reserves 40% of its shelf space for books, 20% for music and 10% for toys and games. The remaining 30% space is equally divided between stationary items and gifts, watches and fragrances. Reliance Retail last week opened a 10,000 sq ft TimeOut store in Mumbai. The company already operates a 42,000 sqft store in Gurgaon and another 21,000 sq ft store in Bangalore among other smaller sized stores. Source: Home - Livemint.com | 31 Dec 2009 | 12:45 pm Chetan Bhagat miffed with 3 Idiots makersMumbai: India’s biggest selling author said the makers of the year’s biggest blockbuster had “played” with him and not given him adequate credit in their film based on his book. Click here to view a slideshow of caricatured newsmakers from 2009 and participate in The Mint Newsmakers Quiz. Chetan Bhagat, whose first book Five Point Someone was a best-seller both in India and across Asia, was approached by the makers of 3 Idiots after the director of the Munnabhai movies, Rajkumar Hirani, read the book in 2006.  Feeling ‘played’: Five Point Someone author Chetan Bhagat. Abhijit Bhatlekar / Mint Produced by Vidhu Vinod Chopra and directed by Hirani, 3 Idiots created box office history by fetching Rs175 crore just days after it was released in 1,750 theatres across the world on Christmas day, which makes it the biggest opening for a Hindi film this past decade. While Bhagat believes that around 70% of the film is based on his book, the makers of the film have previously said that only 2-5% of it is based on the book and that it was like an original script after the changes. On Thursday, Bhagat said in a blog on his website www.chetanbhagat.com that the film-makers had been unfair. He alleged in his blog that, contrary to what the makers have said, much of 3 Idiots is from his original. Bhagat, who remained silent through the making of the film, also wrote that the makers called him to their office and even wanted to take away his name from the credit of the film entirely and instead wanted to say “something like ‘story initiated by’”. The credit given to Bhagat and his book appears in the end credits of the film. In an interview to Mint Lounge on the eve of the film’s release, Hirani had said: “For cinema, we had to introduce a distinct plot since the book was more a slice-of-life kind of narrative. I had told Chetan about the changes and he was fine with the changes.”  Backstory brouhaha: A scene from the film 3 Idiots, 70% of which, Bhagat says, is based on his book. Hirani and Chopra were not available for comment on Thursday. To this, Bhagat said: “I don’t care what Raju has said or what I have said before the release of the film. I saw the film only on the day of the premiere so what I said then was based on half the information.” “My family sat in the theatre shocked, as sequence after sequence came from the book. 2-5% means three-six minutes, and I had told my family to look for the few FPS (Five Point Someone) moments and note them. However, there were so many that it became impossible to keep track. The plot line was same—people meet at ragging, the first class with definition of machine, the friends separate... From Alok (Raju) jumping to stealing the papers and calling out from Cherian’s (Virus’) office—the book came alive on screen. I was surprised and happy that FPS has made it in such a grand way.” The book’s plot was adapted by Hirani and Abhijat Joshi, who together wrote the script and screenplay for the film. The backstory of the principal’s son committing suicide and leaving behind a letter that his sister hides from their father is picked from the book. In the movie, Kareena Kapoor reveals the truth of her brother’s death to her father; her character in the book does the same. But besides the fact that the three lead characters are best friends who stay at the same hostel, there are many additions to the screenplay, such as the happy ending between Rancho (played by Aamir Khan) and Pia (Kareena Kapoor), and what Rancho ends up doing for a living. The characterization of Rancho and his backstory is largely original. While the focus of the book is more on the pressures of life in an engineering college, the film script focuses on how education is imparted in Indian colleges—how our educational system is inherently antithetical to knowledge and free thinking. In 2008, Atul Agnihotri directed Hello with Salman Khan in the lead role, which was based on another of Bhagat’s best-sellers, One Night at a Call Centre. Bhagat is now working on the adaptation of The 3 Mistakes of My Life to be directed by Abhishek Kapoor and produced by Farhan Akhtar’s Excel Entertainment. He is in talks with producers for the adaptation of his latest, 2 States: The Story of My Marriage. Meanwhile, as Bhagat’s blog did the rounds on Twitter, producer Pritish Nandy had another take on this latest controversy: Given Aamir Khan’s penchant for unusual promotional strategies, is it possible the fight with the writer is aimed at pumping up sales of both Five Point Someone and 3 Idiots? Click here for all Mint 2010 issue multimedia specials. feedback@livemint.com Source: LatestNews-Home - Livemint.com | 31 Dec 2009 | 12:45 pm Freedom of speech New Delhi: Sanath Ray retired from his government job the day before his newly wed daughter left for the US with her husband, roughly three years ago. Now he lives comfortably on his government pension, dabbles a little in equities trading on the Bombay Stock Exchange, and loves telling his daughter how cheap it is to stay right where he is, rather than spend so much more moving to the US, as she has been advising him to do.  Photo: Rajkumar / Mint Ray’s favourite arrow in his quiver of rhetoric is this. “I don’t miss my daughter at all now,” he says. “In fact, I talk to her more often than when she was right here living in the same house as me. It would be more expensive to talk to her over the phone locally if I stayed [in the US] than it is to talk to her on the international rates I now get.” Ray is one of the millions of beneficiaries across India, the second largest telecom market in the world and the fastest growing, of a raging tariff war. Ever since Tata Teleservices Ltd began billing its customers for their usage per second, telecom operators have vied to slash prices. The tariff war has now also expanded to include short messaging service (SMS) and roaming charges. From a rate of Rs16 per minute in the mid-1990s, telecom charges have crept asymptotically towards zero. A hitherto-fantastic vision has now begun to materialize: That there is, in fact, such a thing as a free phone conversation. “The scale has led many to believe that there may soon be a time when mobile calls will be free,” says an analyst with a Mumbai-based brokerage firm, asking to remain anonymous because he is not authorized to speak to the media.  A free voice plan could work in a number of ways. For one, an operator could bundle calls along with data and broadband, priced in such a manner that the other services pay for voice. This breed of plan would work only with operators who offer a number of services, explains Atul Bindal, president of mobile services for Bharti Airtel Ltd, India’s largest mobile services operator. Bindal himself doubts that voice will remain completely unmonetized. “As in free Internet service, the consumer would still have to pay to be connected,” he says. But he sees telecom standing “at the intersection of a number of other industries”, spawning innovative business models. “With 3G coming, operators could offer combos of voice, data and maybe some m-commerce, and charge for only two of these three services.” Click here to view a slideshow on 2010: Ten years of mobile service ads. By another model, already present in countries such as the US and the UK, users may be charged a flat fee per month to talk as long as they desire, the analyst points out.  Graphic: Ahmed Raza Khan / Mint But in a market like India, a large share of revenue accrues from rural areas, where services earn less than they cost to deliver. “The firms have to make as much revenue from every call as possible right now,” he says. Kunal Bajaj, managing director of BDA Connect, a strategy analysis firm, outlines one possible scenario with simple arithmetic. “For instance, some firms can charge a flat rate for SMS on a per-month or per-day basis,” he theorizes. “The average revenue for SMS is Rs20 a month, and if an operator has a plan where a subscriber pays Re1 a day for free SMS, then the operator is getting Rs30 a month, thereby increasing their revenue from SMS by Rs10 a month.” A third possibility involves the subsidy of voice by advertising. “As the market stands now, we are seeing increasing segmentation of users happening,” Bindal says. “Some users don’t mind receiving advertisements. But these advertisements have to bring value to the operators...for this to be viable, there has to be a critical mass.” Click here for all Mint 2010 issue multimedia specials But there are disadvantages to such pricing policies. “The downward spiral in price would lead to a downward spiral in quality of services,” Bindal says, and it would “not be sustainable for operators who have nothing else to offer apart from voice”. Cutting rates purely to keep up with the competition may involve ignoring a slew of other costs: licence fees, spectrum charges, taxes, interconnection charges, commissions for distribution channels, and infrastructure costs. “Whether it is advertisement-supported or even get-paid-to-use-your-phone business models, the ecosystem for them to work in India is just not there,” Bajaj says. Contrary to the present trend, rates may even begin to inch back upwards. “The operators are already charging below cost and that cannot go on for long.” Source: Home - Livemint.com | 31 Dec 2009 | 12:45 pm Sun fails to dislodge Taro board at AGMNew Delhi: Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd, India’s largest drug maker by market value, failed to dislodge the existing directors at its takeover target Taro Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd, although most minority shareholders in the Israeli firm voted against their re-election on Thursday. Click here to view a slideshow of caricatured newsmakers from 2009 and participate in The Mint Newsmakers Quiz. Taro’s chairman and key promoter Barrie Levitt and his slate of directors were saved by the one-third voting power the Levitt family has in the company by virtue of being its founders. At Taro’s annual general meeting in Tel Aviv on Thursday, 78% of minority shareholders, including Sun, voted against the re-election of the existing directors.  The minority shareholders did manage to pass a resolution against the election of two external directors. Since status quo has been maintained at Taro, Sun will still have to battle it out in the Israeli Supreme Court to take over the company. The Indian company was buoyed by the stand of the minority shareholders. “Taro’s shareholders have spoken today, clearly and loudly. Taro equity shareholders holding more than two-thirds of its equity want to remove the Levitts and their associates from the board,” said Dilip Shanghvi, chairman and managing director of Sun, in a statement. “Ironically, it is these same directors who claim to be protecting minority shareholder interests. It is abundantly clear to the shareholders that the Levitts and Taro directors have misappropriated the minority shareholder protection argument to justify all their illegal actions.” Sun and Taro have locked horns in the Israeli Supreme Court since 2008. “Even though the current board stays in control, this support for Sun by shareholders sends a signal out to everyone, especially the Supreme Court of Israel, on what the minority shareholders actually want,” a Mumbai-based analyst with a foreign brokerage said. On 18 December, Sun Pharma, which has a stake of around 36% in Taro, had urged its shareholders to vote against the resolutions proposed by the company’s board for the re-election of directors. On 15 December, Templeton Asset Management Co. Ltd, which has a 10% stake in Taro, urged shareholders to vote against indemnifying directors, against the re-election of the board of Taro and against the management in view of the fact that they had not published audited numbers for three years. Sun announced on 21 December that an advisory firm, Proxy Governance Inc., recommended to Taro shareholders that they withhold their votes for re-election of the board of directors of the Israeli firm. When contacted by Mint, Mark Mobius, executive chairman of Templeton Asset Management, said in an email response that while he was waiting to get more details before making a comment, “we are delighted that (over) 70% voted with us”. Templeton recently reversed its position of two-and-a-half years on the battle between Sun Pharma and Taro. It had earlier supported Taro’s resistance against Sun’s takeover plan. In 2008, Sun Pharma launched a share tender offer in the US to acquire a controlling stake in Taro, following a unilateral decision by the Israeli firm’s management to terminate a $454 million (Rs2,120 crore) merger agreement signed by Sun Pharma and Taro in May 2007. Taro’s management challenged this tender offer. It sought orders from an Israeli court to force Sun Pharma to make a special tender offer that would require support from Taro’s majority shareholders. A lower court in Israel had ruled in favour of Sun, but a judgement on an appeal filed by Taro is still awaited from the Israeli Supreme Court. Sun, which rose 43% in 2009, fell 0.43% to Rs1,508.80 in Mumbai trading on Thursday, compared with the Sensex’s 0.7% gain. News of the board meeting was announced after trading closed. Taro rose 0.35% on Wednesday to $8.71, according to Bloomberg. Click here for all Mint 2010 issue multimedia specials. radhieka.p@livemint.com Source: LatestNews-Home - Livemint.com | 31 Dec 2009 | 12:45 pm A barrel of laughsMumbai: In one of his acts, which have achieved near-cult status on YouTube, the cross-dressing British stand-up comic Eddie Izzard channels Darth Vader to gravely intone: “I can kill you with a single thought.” The line, in a way, sums up the art of stand-up comedy. Increasingly, ambitious comics across India are crawling out of the woodwork in search of that thought, setting the stage for stand-up comedy to become a surprisingly big business. Big enough that Don Ward, founder and promoter of the iconic Comedy Store in London, was enticed into investing £2.5 million in a comedy club, the first of its kind in India, opening in Mumbai this March. That kind of money is no laughing matter. “It’s the perfect time for coming in,” says Ward. “In India, you are such an emerging market… You’re the fourth [largest GDP in terms of purchasing power parity] in the world, you’ve embraced a lot of Western things, there’s people earning quite a lot of money… There are a lot of successful young people, and those are the ones I’m looking for.”  Plying the trade: A performer at an open-mike session in New Delhi. Sudhanshu Malhotra / Mint Just as Ward’s club opens, in pleasing synchronicity, the domestic stand-up circuit is coming alive. In New Delhi—known perhaps for a more boisterous sense of humour—there are now at least two open-mike nights for amateur stand-ups every month. One of these is organized by Papa CJ, who has performed across the UK, including at the Comedy Store, and has been on the popular Last Comic Standing television show in the US. (He has “the energy and attitude of an Indian Chris Rock”, one review noted.) The idea, CJ says, is to establish one night every Sunday in different parts of New Delhi, so comics get opportunities to present their material, and audiences get a feel of stand-up. LOL Nites, another set of open-mike evenings in New Delhi, is hosted by Sangeeta Angela Kumar, a newscaster on Headlines Today and an accidental comic. Vir Das, based in Mumbai and one of the younger professional comics when he started at 26 about four years ago, organizes open-mikes around India. Click here to view a slideshow of caricatured newsmakers from 2009 and participate in The Mint Newsmakers Quiz. Finding talent has proven less of a challenge than finding funding—an observation borne out by Kumar’s tale of how she got her comic groove going. “I had gone for one (of) these shows,” she says. “The next time, I just decided to get up on stage.” It was just that simple. Unlike the US, India doesn’t yet have a circuit of comedy clubs where stand-up is performed on a regular basis, acting as a Petri-dish for new artists. Most live events are either ticketed or corporate shows. “India is great for performing, but not for growth,” says CJ. “That’s something we’re trying to change.”  What India does have, however, is a long history of comedians—an umbrella term that reflects a smorgasbord of comedic poets, mimics, stand-up comics and satirists who perform mostly at what Archana Puran Singh, a judge for Sony Entertainment Television’s Comedy Circus, calls “variety shows”. Singh, who became India’s first woman stand-up when she anchored a 1990s Zee TV programme called Wah! Kya Scene Hai, points out that television, after sourcing its talent from “variety shows”, often out in the hinterland, will release comedians back into the stand-up world. “From television, the arrow will point backward to the source,” she predicts. “For example, Raju Shrivastav has been around for 20 years, but one show”—The Great Indian Laughter Challenge—“made him a star”. “All those hundreds of thousands [of comics] now have that platform to aspire to.” Das is sure that most of the money in the comedy market is in Indian languages. “It’s a very middle-class, upper middle-class concept that the money is in English,” he says. And as live performances become financially rewarding, vernacular comedy’s return to the stage might be a blessing, given that ratings for the Hindi comedy shows— comedy contests, really—declined over the past three years. According to data from TAM Media Research, which tracks television viewership, Comedy Circus has gone from a 2.24 average rating in its first season in 2007 to 1.30 in 2009. The Great Indian Laughter Challenge on Star One dipped from a rating of 4.02 in 2007 to 1.78 in 2008, although it picked up marginally to 1.92 in 2009. Click here for all Mint 2010 issue multimedia specials Despite the reservations that stand-up artists have about television —CJ dismisses the comedy shows as “rubbish”; a New Delhi-based comic named Sanjay Rajoura calls them “regressive”—Ward looks forward to partnerships with television to reach out. “The time will come when the Comedy Store, with one of your channels, will be making programmes for local television.” Ward predicts, in particular, a great thirst for local talent, but until that time, making it on the amateur circuit remains difficult. Only a handful of amateurs, such as Rajoura, have broken through into a weak limelight. Rajoura, a computer engineer by day, started off at the LOL Nites because he thought he “could do better” than the people he watched one evening. That was three months ago. Today, he is already performing at corporate events. “It’s fantastic to have people willing to pay me good money,” says Rajoura, who performs in both English and Hindi, and who just completed his first ticketed show. It’s the sort of example CJ and Das look to with hope. “Once comedy is financially viable, it will become professionally acceptable,” says CJ. Das puts it pithily: “The minute people start putting money behind it, you know it’s growing.” tanmaya.n@livemint.com Source: LatestNews-Home - Livemint.com | 31 Dec 2009 | 12:45 pm Consumer Outlook | Willing spirit, weak fleshIt isn’t easy to imagine the sort of pressure on public goods when a billion people—mostly young, slowly getting richer—aspire for a better life, especially when infrastructure and public goods are already of poor quality and in short supply. This is the environment in which the great Indian consumer story will “live” for the next several years, shaping consumer behaviour and throwing up unique market opportunities quite different from those of the past two decades. Toilets; affordable housing; healthcare; old-age homes; schools and colleges; power and water; police; garbage clearance; bandwidth; buses, trains and metros; playgrounds and parks, and many such improvers of life are just not available. Domestic tourism is burgeoning, thanks to more money, but there are no decent public conveniences. Next to premium Mumbai apartments with breathtaking sea views, the rocks in low tide are an unending public toilet for people living in nearby shanties—people who own mobile phones, watches and televisions. What does this do to consumers on both sides of this divide, in terms of setting their priorities? Thus far, the Indian consumer has managed to buy products such as cellphones, Chinese nylon saris and fairness creams even while “slumming” it in basic living conditions. Not just in slums, but in any middle- and lower-income household, the quality of living is way below the standard of goods owned. Will this continue? Will material aspirations be matched by a corresponding rise in aspiration for improved living conditions? It would be surprising—and sad—if this does not happen. The interesting question is: What will consumers in this environment choose to buy next?  Projected forward, this trend suggests that more and more people will spend a larger proportion of their income on such life improvers to avoid any dependence on public systems. As the logistics of life become increasingly difficult, services will emerge to fulfil them. Given the lack of formal full-time jobs, these services will be dominated by individuals just looking for a livelihood. The top 20 cities in India continue to account for the lion’s share of consumption, and many are already experiencing horrendous traffic—lack of roads, lack of road planning, lack of public transport, and rising car ownership. Will families increasingly prefer to stay at home and entertain themselves? Possibly. Or head to the nearest mall? Probably that too. But when it is impossible to park at the mall, it stops being fun, and the frequency will decrease. The big-ticket items of this next phase of consumption will be healthcare, education, travel, communication, transportation, entertainment, productivity tools, nutrition, and infrastructure (inverters, water storage gadgets, collapsible cupboards, efficient furniture). “Do-good” products will sell more than “feel-good” ones. A luxury goods marketer from overseas asked me whether the lack of enthusiasm for expensive branded handbags in India was because women didn’t understand the value of brands. If so, when did I think that would change? I explained that there were so many real things we needed to spend on—not the least of which are tuitions to make up for bad teaching in schools—that branded handbags became a low priority. Consumer India does not possess the surplus income to simultaneously improve life as well as move up the value chain to purchase “nice-to-have” non-core items. In this dilemma, life improving products win out. This is a consumer base which has consistently shown us, in category after category, that it would rather stretch for more (better features at a higher price) than settle for less (fewer features at a lower price). Suppliers need to be able to tap into this. Trying to grow higher order consumption while leaving basic needs unfulfilled is akin to building a house that does not rest on a foundation. We think we have managed to pull this off so far because we don’t have data on how, over time, the share of the wallet in paying for basics is going up and how that is happening. The cellphone has become a must in order to get one’s work done. The bottled water miracle is a result of the lack of potable water from any other source and the fear of falling ill. Coaching classes survive because too few college seats are on offer. What more we can get the Indian consumer to consume, in this same vein, will depend on the imagination of suppliers to cater to this blockbuster need. Illustration by Jayachandran/Mint Rama Bijapurkar is an independent market strategy consultant. Respond to this column at feedback@livemint.com Source: LatestNews-Home - Livemint.com | 31 Dec 2009 | 12:45 pm Press 1 to pay tax, 2 for birth certificateBangalore: India is drafting new rules to avail the services of private information technology (IT) firms for a range of government functions such as collecting taxes or issuing birth certificates, allowing transactions to be conducted electronically or through mobile phones, which are more pervasive in the country than computers. Click here to view a slideshow of caricatured newsmakers from 2009 and participate in The Mint Newsmakers Quiz. The proposed rules bring out, for the first time, uniform national standards and policies to be adopted by the Centre and states for improved public-private partnership (PPP) in the delivery of e-governance services, analysts said. The draft of the Information Technology (Electronic Service Delivery) Rules, 2009, to be included under section 6A of the Information Technology (Amendment) Act, 2008, was put online (Mit.gov.in) last week for public comment. The rules are to be notified in the official gazette after discussion, which could take six-eight weeks, experts said. India first drew up a cyber law policy to propel e-commerce and govern technology-related practices in 2000. The move comes as both the Union and state governments are implementing computerization projects aimed at providing such services to people. The biggest of this is the national e-governance plan, or NEGP, with 27 integrated mission mode projects to be executed through the PPP model. India’s two largest IT firms, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd and Infosys Technologies Ltd, have each won two NEGP projects that would allow them to offer for a fee services such as applying for a passport through manned kiosks or registering a company via online portals. The government has earmarked $5 billion (Rs23,350 crore) to be spent over five years on NEGP projects, according to Springboard Research, a technology research firm. “The biggest impact we would see is (more participation) of the private sector that would ultimately benefit the end consumer (citizens),” said Pavan Duggal, who heads the cyber law panel at the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India, or Assocham, an industry lobby group. “It also includes delivering services through any type of technology—take mobiles, even social media.” India has nearly 550 million mobile subscribers, which means one in every two Indian owns a mobile device. In contrast, the total installed base of computers as of May was 36 million, according to technology researcher IDC. Since then, at least four million additional computers have been sold. The new rules provide state governments a model to allow government transactions through private partners; for issuing and managing digital signatures for transacting online or through mobile phones, and storing the records for regulatory purposes. “It lays down standards and procedures (for e-governance transactions),” said George Paul, executive vice-president at HCL Infosystems Ltd. “Once there are standards, it invites more (private) people to participate.” HCL has built a statewide network in Punjab connecting the treasury and accounts departments with the excise, taxation and transport wings as well as municipal corporations, among others. HCL is also running a pilot for distribution of payments to workers in rural areas under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, or NREGA, which promises 100 days of employment for one person from each poor family from the villages. “The 10 years (since the Act was formed) are not wasted,” Paul said. “During this period, lot of e-governance projects have happened. We have learnt of lot of things, gained experience and know what works and what doesn’t. That knowledge is important to define standards.” Several states such as Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh already have public-private partnerships for the payment of utility bills and getting copies of land records. But so far, the rules have been framed on a case-by-case basis for individual projects, as a comprehensive policy was lacking. The new rules “will give government backing to those private service providers delivering government services”, said N. Vijayashankar, a former member of the policy advisory group of the IT Act. “It will improve trust in them among people.” Click here for all Mint 2010 issue multimedia specials. raghu.k@livemint.com Source: Tech News - Livemint.com | 31 Dec 2009 | 12:45 pm An airy blue yearMumbai: How different 2010 will be from 2005 will be, among other things, a function of how different pink is from blue. The year 2005 was a bright, bubblegum pink—a colour, now so five years ago. The new year will be tinted an airy, light blue, with possibly a purple patch held over from 2009 and speckles of green. It will offer “clarity and hope”—undercut with a stern reminder of our precarious ecology.  Graphics: Rahul Awasthi / Mint This, at least, is the forecast of Freedom Tree Design, a Mumbai-based trend and colour consultancy. In the spirit of “reclaiming our planet, our colour blue is airy, optimistic—symbolizing new renewable energy, resources of water and air, and the free spirit,” says Latika Khosla, Freedom Tree’s design director. “Purple, which represents the do-or-die spirit, will be a continuing story from 2009, along with green, which will be imperative in branding and corporate directive for companies that are looking to be more environmentally responsible.” Khosla holds the Asia-Pacific chair for the Colour Marketing Group (CMG), a 47-year-old international association of 1,100 designers who forecast colour trends for companies—a feat that is more science than art. “Consultant companies…keep a finger on the pulse of markets in general. An in-house forecaster may not have the availability to track success across a variety of markets,” says Jane Stockel, CMG’s special envoy to the Asia-Pacific region. “Companies need to be able to change quickly in reaction to forces beyond their control such as the global financial meltdown.” Colour forecasters make their predictions—often up to three years in advance—by exploring new products and technologies; trends in fashion, music and celebrity-wear; and economic and sociological influences. The forecasters then crunch this data into what their clients crave: Information about what colours will sell best. And it’s an important information; CMG research shows that colour can make for up to 85% of the reason people choose to buy a product. In 2005, for instance, Khosla picked a hot pink, responding to a new emergence of girl power; the colour quickly spread across categories as diverse as sports, cars and cellphones. “Women were emerging as very strong decision makers… [They] were more confident about their femininity,” she recalls. The forecasts sound, in some way, like self-fulfilling prophecies: Predict a colour trend, convince enough companies of its inevitability, watch them flood the market with products in that colour and thereby make the trend come true. Amit Syngle, vice-president of sales and marketing at Asian Paints Ltd, insists that forecasts are as predictive as they are prescriptive. “When our researchers and consultants come together to pick the colour trends for the year, they look at a number of social, economic and lifestyle trends,” says Syngle. “So when we pick a palette of colour, we’re saying that these are the trends that we are expecting and here are the colours likely to match or complement this future trend.” Few forecasters are as specific as those at Pantone Llc., a renowned colour authority that has picked Turquoise 15-5519 as their colour for 2010. Instead, forecasters prescribe broad palettes of colour, to better cater to clients such as cosmetics manufacturers or coordinators of bridal ensembles. For instance, Lakmé, Hindustan Unilever Ltd’s cosmetics brand, subscribes to make-up forecasts from Paris and Milan, but it then assimilates these into directives for the Indian skin tone. A palette also helps cycle regularly through fashionable colours; LG Electronics India Pvt. Ltd introduces two or three new colour variants every six months. When shrewdly chosen, a colour can even bump a product into a premium category, worthy of aspiration, such as LG’s Scarlet and Jazz range of burgundy-coloured electronics. “At the higher end, we have darker colours and finishes, which make the product look very chic and premium,” says Charu Khilnani, LG India’s chief designer. “Mass market products tend to lean towards brighter and more vibrant colours.” But not everybody buys into the value of colour forecasts. “I wouldn’t undermine the importance of colour forecasts, especially for brands that export to global markets, where there is some rigidity (in seasonal colours),” says Nachiket Barve, a Mumbai-based fashion designer. “But I think it’s limiting to expect everyone to love that one colour. Why should I be a conformist and let someone tell me I should be some XYZ orange?” In India, aesthetics tend to be driven more by the Bollywood, says Sujata Keshavan, managing director for Ray + Keshavan| The Brand Union. “You can forecast whatever you please, but if Kareena Kapoor is wearing hot pink, so will everyone else. It will become the prevailing, preferred trend,” she says. Keshavan strongly believes that colour forecasting is “nonsense” in the Indian context. “India is simply too large and heterogenous a population for a set of people to determine colour preferences.” Would a bland blue even make an impact in a country that gravitates towards the warm tones of reds, browns and pinks? The light blue is “a simple colour, but you’ll be astonished to see how it makes its way into industries, products and services”, says Freedom Tree’s Khosla. She maintains that while brands may choose to embrace drastically different colour stories, the airy blue will find some representation. “The question is: Can they afford to miss an important colour direction?” she says. “I seriously doubt it. Just like you need a business plan, you need a colour plan.” gouri.s@livemint.com Source: LatestNews-Home - Livemint.com | 31 Dec 2009 | 12:45 pm Another changing climateNew Delhi: In early 2009, Rohini Aggarawal left her job at PriceWaterhouseCoopers Pvt. Ltd to start her own company, named ARX Bizness Advisors Llp and bearing the still-novel suffix of “Llp”, short for “limited liability partnership”. The Llp structure got statutory recognition from the ministry of corporate affairs (MCA) last year; Aggarawal’s firm, she says, was only the 36th such company to be registered. Llp involves exactly what its name entails, combining a company’s limited-liability benefits with a partnership’s flexibility. Consulting mostly on indirect tax, for instance, Aggarawal is responsible only for what she does; her partner, also a chartered accountant, bears responsibility for his own work. “That’s the beauty,” she says. “A partner is liable only for his or her wrongdoing, unlike in the case of a partnership firm, where the firm is responsible.” Aggarawal cites the example of Satyam Computer Services Ltd’s accounting fraud, in which Price Waterhouse Bangalore, a partnership firm, was probed by the Central Bureau of Investigation. Click here to view a slideshow of caricatured newsmakers from 2009 and participate in The Mint Newsmakers Quiz Designed to make it easier for chartered accountants, lawyers and venture capitalists to set up companies, Llp is a new option for Indian entrepreneurs. “So far, more than 420 Llps have registered,” says a senior official at MCA, wishing to remain anonymous. “We hope to see many more registering in 2010.”  Finally, aiming for an April 2011 deadline, Indian companies will also begin converging their books of accounts with the international financial reporting standards (IFRS). But Jamil Khatri, an executive director of KPMG in India, is sceptical about Indian industry’s preparedness for this change. “Even while the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India has started an 80-hour course for chartered accountants, corporate India will take time to comply with IFRS,” Khatri says. For its part, the government, says Salman Khursheed, Union minister for corporate affairs, is moving very fast. “Whether it is the Companies Bill or the Competition Act,” he says, “the idea is to facilitate corporates doing business in a hassle-free atmosphere, but with stronger self-regulation, so that frauds...can be avoided.” The Companies Bill proposes that certified valuers—such as chartered accountants, company secretaries or cost accountants—should value the assets, properties, tangibles and intangibles of companies before they go in for mergers and acquisitions or initial public offerings. This Bill will trigger substantial changes in the way business is conducted. “As always happens, it will be a mixed bag,” says Ketan Dalal, executive director of PriceWaterhouseCoopers India. “On the positive front, there are several provisions that simplify mergers and acquisitions, including facilitating of cross-border mergers. But...there are provisions relating to registered valuers which can complicate matters, such as the pricing of preferential issues requiring such valuation, in spite of existing Securities and Exchange Board of India guidelines.” Dalal readily provides another example of the Bill’s mixed-bag nature. Some clauses allow directors to videoconference into meetings and managers to earn more liberal remuneration; others restrict fund-raising options such as raising company deposits. The implementation date for GST, once touted as April 2010, may be pushed to October or even to 2011, as state governments battle to modify its details or avoid it altogether. Finance minister Pranab Mukherjee conceded in December that the original deadline wouldn’t be met. “There were differences of opinions, but states have already converged on the basic structure as reflected in the draft agreement," Asim Dasgupta, chairman of the empowered committee of state finance ministers, says guardedly. “I won’t say anything now about when we would be achieving it. The target date for introduction will be discussed in the first part of January. I’ll have to sit with (Union finance minister) Pranab Mukherjee before making an announcement.” Once implemented, GST’s impact is expected to be largely positive. “Multiple taxation and multiple rates of taxation will go, and companies will not be forced to plan their business in a way that helps them avoid multiple taxation,” says Pratik Jain, executive director of the indirect tax practice at KPMG India. “If a commodity is manufactured in Delhi and sold in Mumbai, the company has to pay taxes at one level in Delhi and at another level in Mumbai. As a result, companies are opening warehouses in Mumbai, from which they sell in Mumbai.” Setting off input costs can become easier; exports can become more competitive. Not every architecture of regulation will smoothly slip into action. The fate of the Companies Bill will be determined by how promptly the parliamentary standing committee submits its evaluation of the Bill. The shadow of the direct tax code also looms over 2010, but a finance ministry official admits that it may not materialize early this year. The code, which proposes a dramatic renovation of the country’s 48-year-old tax law and includes significant tax rate cuts for individuals and companies, is yet to be cleared by the cabinet—which would then turn it into a Bill for debate in Parliament. The Competition Act has been implemented in fits and starts; important norms relating to mergers and acquisitions have yet to be notified by the government. “But we are already investigating nine cases of cartelization and abuse of dominance, which suggests the commission is active,” says an official at the Competition Commission of India, who did not want to be identified. “All we need to do is to hire more staff, and that is happening.” Graphics by Jayachandran/Mint sangeeta.s@livemint.com Romita Datta from Kolkata contributed to this story. Source: LatestNews-Home - Livemint.com | 31 Dec 2009 | 12:45 pm IPO scam: Sebi passes Rs 15cr orderMarket regulator Sebi on Thursday settled the case against market players Jitendra Lalwani and Sheelu Lalwani for their alleged involvement in the IPO scam on payment of about Rs 15 crore.Source: India Business News | Business News - Times of India | 31 Dec 2009 | 12:43 pm January 110: Events to watch out forJanuary 1: Events to watch out forSource: Moneycontrol Top Headlines | 31 Dec 2009 | 12:35 pm Re-engaging with the worldFrom nuclear power to investing overseas, a confident India says its open to business.Source: Business Standard | Front Page Headlines | 31 Dec 2009 | 12:05 pm 10 molecules for 2010Click here to view a slideshow of ten molecules to watch out for in 2010 Click here for all Mint 2010 issue multimedia specials Source: Tech News - Livemint.com | 31 Dec 2009 | 12:00 pm The old order changesPHONE vs PC  Source: Paul Kedrosky, Morgan Stanley GREEN vs GREY  Source: The United Nations Environmental Programme and The Guardian TWEETS vs POKES  Source: comScore, Mint research FINANCE vs MICROFINANCE  Source: Institute for Financial Management and Research NORTH vs SOUTH The balance of global economic power is tilting. In October 2008, the International Monetary Fund predicted that the combined gross domestic product (GDP) of developing countries, measured in terms of purchasing power parity, would exceed that of developed countries in 2013. That crossover year may now have advanced, given the sluggish economic recovery in rich countries and the stronger rebounds in the developing world. Watch the gap close to a whisker in 2010—and, as a result, more jostling for seats at the high table of global governance. Source: International Monetary Fund, Euromonitor FARM vs FACTORY  Source: Reserve Bank of India WHEAT vs WHEELS  Source: Central Statistical Organisation, McKinsey and Co. Illustrations by Shyamal Banerjee Source: Home - Livemint.com | 31 Dec 2009 | 12:00 pm India is world's third best performing market in 2009 - Financial Express
Source: Business - Google News | 31 Dec 2009 | 11:53 am Private cos to arm police with modern weaponsThe Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has turned to Indias private sector to arm the police forces with weapons needed to respond to terror attacks like 26/11.??On December 21, MHA promulgated a draft Arms and Ammunition Manufacturing Policy, which allows the Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion (Dipp) to issue licence to large private companies that are capable of producing advanced weapons, and invest over Rs 50 crore, to manufacture arms and ammunition to be primarilySource: Business Standard | Front Page Headlines | 31 Dec 2009 | 11:42 am Sun Pharma snubs Taro on appointing external directorsSun Pharma, backed by minority shareholders of Israels Taro Pharmaceuticals, has succeeded in preventing Taros founder family led by Barrie Levitt from appointing independent directors of their choice to the Taro Board.Source: Business Standard | Front Page Headlines | 31 Dec 2009 | 11:40 am In a first, Maha asks Videocon to shift SEZOffers 2,000 acres in Punes Saswad taluk.Source: Business Standard | Front Page Headlines | 31 Dec 2009 | 11:36 am Newyear boost for Sun: Taro shareholders vote against mgmtIn a definitive step towards Indias Sun Pharma gaining control of Israels Taro, most shareholders of the Israeli pharmaceutical firm today voted against the current management of the company.Source: Moneycontrol Top Headlines | 31 Dec 2009 | 9:54 am Trigger Happy2010 is a really interesting year for videogames, and the strange thing about that is that it wasn’t supposed to be. Due to a combination of delays, corporate panic about the recession and packed schedules - a lot of games due to release in 2009 have slipped into the coming year. These delays are a good thing, because they gave a lot of these really experimental titles more time to be play tested and polished to a shine. We look at three titles- Splinter Cell: Conviction, Heavy Rain, and Civilization Network - that sound the most promising. Click herefor all Mint 2010 issue multimedia specials Source: Tech News - Livemint.com | 31 Dec 2009 | 9:48 am SEBI writes to IRDA on regulating UlipsThe capital markets regulator— SEBI has written to the insurance regulator- IRDA saying that Unit Linked Insurance Plans (Ulips) are actually mutual funds and should be regulated by SEBI.Source: HindustanTimes.com - Top Business News Headlines | 31 Dec 2009 | 9:24 am Asia stocks up 68Asia stocks rose on Thursday, racking up a 68 percent gain for the year, as a jump in US consumer confidence reinforced views that the world's largest economy is gradually recovering. Source: HindustanTimes.com - Top Business News Headlines | 31 Dec 2009 | 9:23 am PVR targets 50% screen additions in 2010There have been seen some strong releases in the last month of 2009. Avatar, 2012, 3 Idiots and Paa have all managed very good openings and brought in festive cheer for the company. In an interview with CNBCTV18, Pramod Arora, President CEO, PVR Ltd., spoke about the recent releases and the number of screens targeted to be added in 2010.Source: Moneycontrol Top Headlines | 31 Dec 2009 | 9:23 am Markets on rebound pathA sense of optimism prevailed at the market as the sensex closed the day on a positive note with a again of 121 points on the final day of trading in 2009 and closed the year with a gain of 81 per cent which is the highest one year gain since 1993 to close the year at 17,464.8. Source: HindustanTimes.com - Top Business News Headlines | 31 Dec 2009 | 9:22 am Food inflation at 19.8% as pulses, potatoes jumpThe wholesale price-based index of food articles increased by 1.18% for the week ended December 19 from 18.65% a week ago.Source: India Business News | Business News - Times of India | 31 Dec 2009 | 9:10 am Expect Rs 550 cr turnover, Rs 35 cr PAT: Relaxo FootwearsRamesh Kumar Dua, Chaiman of Relaxo Footwears expects a turnover of Rs 550 crore and a profit after tax (PAT) of Rs 35 crore this financial year. The company is looking at expanding capacities.Source: Moneycontrol Top Headlines | 31 Dec 2009 | 9:08 am India to enter a new orbit of swifter growth: Bharti AirtelFrom 2010, India will enter a new orbit of swifter growth and global innovation. Both government and industry will need to collaborate more intensively to sustain 89% GDP growth through this decade to enable 300 million people.Source: Moneycontrol Top Headlines | 31 Dec 2009 | 8:43 am Expect order book of Rs 5000cr by April: McNally BharatMcNally Bharat Engineering\'s Chairman Deepak Khaitan says that the rights issue will help correct its debtequity structure. He expects an order book of Rs 5,000 crore by April and believes that the acquisition synergies will flow in FY10 and FY11.Source: Moneycontrol Top Headlines | 31 Dec 2009 | 8:21 am The worst of slowdown is behind us, says Mahindra HolidaysIn an interview with CNBCTV18, Arun Nanda, Vice Chairman, Mahindra Holiday and Resorts, spoke about the latest happenings in his company and sector.Source: Moneycontrol Top Headlines | 31 Dec 2009 | 8:02 am The year of never getting lost Bangalore: In Bangalore, where one-way streets bloom as often as the next traffic jam, Yusuf Motiwala’s guide to the city is a handy device mounted on his car’s dashboard. This isn’t a standard satellite-based global positioning system (GPS) device, but a Nokia N800 tablet with a 4-inch display. It pulls updated local maps from Google, connects to the Internet, uses both the cellphone network and GPS, and throws up accurate directions for every lane in Bangalore.  Stay connected: Yusuf Motiwala uses a Nokia N800 tablet with a 4-inch display to find his way around Bangalore. Hemant Mishra / Mint With this gadget, says Motiwala, founder of a telecom start-up called TringMe, he now rarely gets lost, whether in Bangalore or in his native village in Gujarat. Motiwala is a beneficiary of the swift spread of GPS mapping in India. The number of regular navigators-by-phone in India, according to research firm Canalys, will grow from 183,000 to 1.2 million by 2013. That figure may appear small compared with Japan’s 3.3 million, but it nevertheless represents a sharp and significant increase—and an exciting one. In the coming year, GPS maps will migrate into mid-range instruments, putting accurate directions into the hands of many hundreds of thousands. Most of the interactive maps available today—from firms such as Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. and Reliance Communications Ltd’s Big Maps—are found on GPS-enabled smartphones. Of the smartphones sold in India in the September quarter, 86% came with integrated GPS, as against only 24% with such a facility a year earlier, according to Canalys.  In that same quarter, sales of GPS-equipped smartphones doubled from the previous year, to 445,000, but the prices remained steep. Thus, for GPS to grow, it had to percolate to the rest of the 550 million low- to mid-range mobile phones. That, says Daryl Chiam, an analyst at Canalys’ Singapore office, is finally beginning to happen: “The phones (with GPS navigation features) have also really started to go down in price only now.” Nokia Oyj, which sells two out of three cellphones in India, has begun to reduce the cost of entry, with GPS-equipped phones priced at around Rs15,000. “The price point has already come down. It’s the habit that is the issue,” says D. Shivakumar, managing director for Nokia India. “More points of interest (in maps), an improved sensory experience of the phones, and voice in navigation” will, he thinks, power growth further. Other cellphone manufacturers appear even more ambitious, keen to break the Rs10,000 barrier and trigger an even larger adoption of GPS. Vikas Jain, business director of Indian cellphone maker Micromax Informatics Ltd, says his firm plans to launch several map-enabled phones around that price. “Once you break the price barrier, the device becomes more friendly, and people will experiment with it more,” he says. “There’s a big ecosystem of GPS applications for which the mobile is the most promising device. But...there hasn’t been traction. With those applications, your mobile is not just a GPS phone, it becomes a device for location-based services.” But technical challenges persist. A GPS service bleeds a phone battery dry as it identifies exact coordinates—longitude and latitude points—from positioning satellites. Searching for a location from a closed room is also difficult; GPS devices do not work well indoors. Vinay Goel, head of products at Google India, experienced this recently when he attempted through Google’s voice search to locate a restaurant in Basavanagudi, an older section of Bangalore. “If you’re driving a car and you can’t type, you can speak into the phone and get directions,” Goel says. At the time, however, he was indoors and the GPS in his high-end BlackBerry failed him. But a decade-old technology, which had been not exploited until recently, threw up accurate search results, with the location marked clearly on a map. The answer lies in triangulation, which determines a location based on signal strength to the three nearest cellphone towers, within an accuracy margin of 200m. This isn’t quite as perfect as GPS, where locations are geo-tagged with their longitude and latitude coordinates and can be tracked within 20m. But triangulation is a robust option for low-cost phones; mobile phones with general packet radio service (GPRS) are available for prices as low as Rs3,500. Firms such as Yulop WebSense Solutions Pvt. Ltd, Imere Technologies Pvt. Ltd, Four Interactive Pvt. Ltd (which runs Asklaila.com) and Onze Technologies India Pvt. Ltd have developed different approaches to triangulation. Onze provides guidance via SMS; a user sends Onze a message asking for an address and receives directions as well as local landmarks in a texted response. Imere uses a combination of triangulation and Internet protocol address to pinpoint a location. SatNav Technologies, a GPS navigation equipment maker, is also experimenting with a solution on basic handsets to help track the movement of people or goods in real time using triangulation—targeted as much at managers of truck fleets as at parents monitoring their children. SatNav’s solution is scheduled to launch in January, and it aims squarely to complement the higher-end GPS services. “If you are looking at 90% of the market, then you need to exploit cell towers,” says Amit Prasad, founder and chief executive of SatNav Technologies. “GPS will be at the top of that pyramid.” Source: Tech News - Livemint.com | 31 Dec 2009 | 7:38 am Services attract highest FDI at USD 3 12 bn in Apr Oct 2009 10The services sector continues to remain the favourite destination for foreign investors as it attracted USD 3.12 billion FDI in the first seven months of 2009-10Source: HindustanTimes.com - Top Business News Headlines | 31 Dec 2009 | 5:43 am India 3G auction set for FebruaryIndia's bandwidth auctions for third generation (3G) mobile telephone services will be held in February after being pushed back from their original date, an official said Thursday.Source: HindustanTimes.com - Top Business News Headlines | 31 Dec 2009 | 4:38 am RBI says to review rates only on Jan 29HYDERABAD, India (Reuters) - The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) will review interest rates at its next policy review scheduled for Jan. 29 and not before, a deputy RBI governor said on Thursday.Source: Reuters: Money News | 31 Dec 2009 | 4:20 am MTNL puts overseas acquisition on hold, keen to parnter BSNL New Delhi: State-run MTNL has put its overseas acquisitions plans on the backburner for the time being as it decides to focus on improving its marketshare in Delhi and Mumbai—the only places where it operates. “Right now we don’t have any plans. I am concentrating on my in-house business more. We are doing very well in Nepal and Mauritius, which are going to fetch good revenues. It is not that we have all together stopped. For some time we are not very active,” MTNL chairman and managing director R.S.P. Sinha said. However, the NYSE listed company has expressed its desire to partner its big brother PSU BSNL in their overseas acquisition, especially in the emerging markets. The PSU has a mobile subscriber base of 44 lakh and is eyeing 50 lakh before the fiscal end. MTNL shares were trading at Rs73.85, down 0.94%. “If BSNL is looking towards them (emerging markets) for acquisitions, we would also like to join them as a partner when they finally decide (on any target company). We tell them take us along with you as a partner,” he said. BSNL has placed a bid for buying up to 75% stake in Zambia’s lone fixed line operator Zamtel. In the past MTNL had lost the bid to Kenya’s second national licence. After emerging as the preferred buyer for Sri Lanka’s Suntel, the PSU put the proposal on the backburner as valuation issues cropped up over some legal liabilities. Source: Tech News - Livemint.com | 31 Dec 2009 | 4:10 am High potato pulses rates push food inflation to 19 83 pcIndia's annual food inflation based on wholesale prices rose to 19.83 per cent for the week ended Oct 19 from 18.65 per cent the week before as prices of essential commodities continued to rule high.Source: HindustanTimes.com - Top Business News Headlines | 31 Dec 2009 | 2:01 am
|
