Economy
WTO: Services, the key for India
THIS POEM perhaps best describes the fear psychosis in India on the World Trade Organisation's implications for the economy. This is despite the fact the WTO's objectives include increasing standard of living, multistage effective demand and full employm ent, expansion of production, trade of goods, and so on.

Editorial
Protecting banks from market hits
PRESCRIBING STIFFER RULES on bank exposure to the stock market could be, akin to biblical commandments, prone to lapses. Over time, the RBI has laid down norms for banks placing funds in the market or lending monies against shares and even today they suf fice provided they are stuck to. At least, the stock market is still less risky than funding Bollywood, which has no balance sheet to offer for scrutiny. The Finance Minister, Mr Yashwant Sinha, after a three-hour talk with bankers, has said the RBI cred it policy on April 19 will have new norms on the subject. Bankers at the meet were all from the nationalised banks, most if not all of them having no trading desk to deal in the bourses. His message would have been better directed at the new private bank s some of which, preening feathers borrowed from foreign entities, have been transgressing RBI rules.

Environment
Search for cleaner fuels: CNG or LPG?
THE SEARCH for a cleaner motor vehicle fuel appears to have started in right earnest in the country, throwing up a multitude of problems. The bursting of a fake CNG cylinder, while being filled at a petrol pump in Ghatkopar, Mumbai, and the troubling sit uation in New Delhi, with road transport operators failing to comply with the Supreme Court order on conversion to CNG, clearly underline the fact that ad hoc solutions will not solve automotive emission and pollution problems. The developed countries, p articularly Germany, France and the US, (California), have come up with stringent pollution control norms on vehicle emission.

Information Technology
Digital deluge
NETIZENS, whether they are individuals or corporates, who are already flooded with data the moment they connect to Web sites through Internet, are in danger of being swept away in the torrential rapids in the convergence era that is already upon them. Al ready, there is what an operative in the CIA called in typical bureaucratese ``a volume challenge of staggering proportion'' or what an ordinary mortal would have simply dubbed as digital deluge.

Politics
Pakistanisation of India?
IN 1994, Aldrich Ames, a senior officer of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for working for many years for the Soviet and Russian intelligence and having exposed to the latter the identit ies of many CIA sources in the USSR/Russia in return for heavy payments. He has since been sentenced to a long term of imprisonment.

Combating money power in US elections
THE RECENT (and rapidly receding in public memory) country-wide breast-beating over the disclosures tehelka.com could only have stemmed from two factors: One, the tremendous visual impact of the candid camera clips of the erstwhile president of the Bhara tiya Janata Party, Mr Bangaru Laxman, coolly receiving and thrusting a lakh of rupees in wads of currency notes into his office drawer and asking for further handouts in dollars, and the Samata Party president, Ms Jaya Jaitly, matter-of-factly asking the smart operators posing as arms dealers to hand over the Rs 2 lakh offered by them for her good offices in promoting their deal to Mr Srinivas Prasad, a leading light of the Party who was also a Minister in the Vajpayee Cabinet.

Tehelka and parliamentary paralysis
THE Tehelka sting operation at a cost of about Rs 12 lakh has, according to one report, cost the nation over Rs 42 crore worth of parliamentary time with both Houses of Parliament not conducting business in the manner the electorate expects them to do. I t does not augur well for parliamentary democracy if the Houses, convened at a cost of Rs 9.5 lakh per hour to the exchequer, do not transact business for six days together and even more, allow themselves to be hijacked by the shouting brigades, calling each other chors. It does not speak well of our system of governance that the Railway Budget presented by the then Railways Minister, Ms Mamata Banerjee, and the rather better appreciated 2001-02 Union Budget presented by Mr Yashwant Sinha, were subjecte d to the same fate -- a vote on account, without the benefit of a general discussion. The people's representatives have lost the opportunity to voice their opinions about the Budget that has varying financial implications for different sections, to also engage in a constructive and critical debate on the Finance Minister's proposals, including acceleration of second generation reforms, restructuring of the food management system, and labour law reforms, which have extra-budgetary significance that no se nsible member of Parliament could have missed. The Fiscal Responsibility Bill and others are also pending.

The Sino-American conundrum
HAS the irresistible force of American imperial conceit met its match in the immovable object of Chinese primordial hubris? A US spy plane, the `Kohinoor' of Washington's naval electronic technology, has fallen into Chinese hands. The propellered aircraf t and its crew of 24 were either in Chinese airspace or else perilously close to it. Two Chinese fighters closed in on the intruder, which was hit and damaged in the manoeuvre. One of the Chinese planes crashed and its pilot was killed.

Page One | Index | Home