So Salman Khan is convicted and sentenced to 5 years of rigorous imprisonment.
Does this bring to an end a 13 years old sordid saga? Unfortunately No. There are bail applications, appeals to High court and the Supreme court. The story goes on.
Is the sentence too harsh ? After all he did not do it intentionally (Farha Khan Ali); and the he runs a charity - Being Human (Salman's lawyers). Moreover, those dogs (the dead and the injured) had no business sleeping of the pavement (Abhijeet).
What the quantum of the sentence should be, is for the honourable court to decide. But Salman did not exactly knock off a glass of water in a restaurant table. He killed a MAN and seriously injure four innocent MEN. If he did it intentionally, he should be in jail for the rest of his life, if not hanged. That is the law of the land Ms Khan Ali, and applies without prejudice to all and sundry and even to the Dabang Khan. The maximum punishment under section 304 II IPC is 10 years. The judge has been very considerate when he has given a sentence of 5 years for killing a man and destroying the families livelihood and so crippled 4 that they remain incapable of earning a livelihood for themselves at young age.
Yes Salman has contributed to charity and helped many people, but how does that justify drunken driving leading to death and injury.
And if every man had the right squash dogs on the pavement under the wheel of his car, then we are not living in a sane world. Mr Abhijeet & Ms Khan Ali, there are hundred on Indians who are born on the footpath, lives there and dies there. That is urban India, in case you haven't noticed. Probably the government need to do more, but what have you done ?!
Land for agriculture and environment vs land for development is a vicious cycle. Recently the Madhya Pradesh government sent a proposal to the Central government seeking permission to flatten the centuries old Chambal ravines to make the land available for agriculture. Can you play with vast creation of nature? What will be the cost, both material and to the environment? Who will cultivate the land thus created ? As the population increases, there will be an increasing demand for land for housing, industries and for creation of other utilities. It will also be a greater demand for food, jobs, water, electricity. There will be a larger creation garbage (mostly non bio degradable) and sewage. For all these agricultural land and forest land will be acquired. That will thus, leave lesser land available to grow grains and vegetables, for which the demands will continue to increase. Lesser forest cover means lesser rainfall, lesser groundwater and higher temperatures. Taking away agricultural land will push more people towards the cities, but the jobs and capacity building will not move at the same pace. This will lead to increase in crime in the urban areas. The increase in industries and larger quantity of sewage and non biodegradable wastes will poison and kill our rivers and soil and make our air unbreathable. The signs are already visible in our cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, Lo;kata etc. It is against this backdrop that the land acquisition bill must be seen.
I was watching a documentary on BBC about America's efforts at insourcing or inshoring - bringing back jobs to America. Someone made a statement that the way India made its Silicon Valley in Bangalore, US is trying to build its Bangalore in South Dakota. It might not seem serious now, but the signs are ominous. Last year US brought back an equal number of jobs as compared to the number of jobs that went out of the country. This is a significant change from the last couple of decades when large number of jobs fled America to China and India. What India must do to counter this?! For one, listen to Raghuram Rajan. It should not be just "Nake in India", but also "Make in India, for India". India for long, has focussed on building software as per client requirements abroad, i.e. the idea and design came from abroad and Indians only implemented it. It must change now. Focus must be on new ideas and innovations. Not just in the area of IT, but also in other areas like manufacturing and agriculture. India must also focus on quality, in every sphere. Anyone will tell you that a Lux soap made and Sold in India, is far inferior to the Lux soap that you can buy in, say, Dubai. The emission quality from our vehicles, and the safety standards in the vehicles sold in India, are far inferior to the vehicles that we export to Europe. The government must ensure that we get the same exacting standards in the country that we provide for European countries. Yes, the vehicles will get more expensive, but we will breath a better air. We cannot forever continue to be the price leader. We need to raise the bar. We need to make innovative and quality products, in India, for India. And this need to start from ensuring quality school and college education, quality teachers and innovation built into the curriculum. Can the government do it ?!
Rina died a new days back. I buried her, somewhere deep in my heart.
She was a dream. And like all beautiful dreams, she was great, as along as she was there. I loved her dearly. But she was so distant, almost inviolable, darting in and out of the dark clouds of my life; as though she came from another planet. A shimmering but very remote planet. A place, whose thought sent the mind into a convulsion of emotions. From my distant perch, it appeared to be a land of milk and honey. But it also conjured images of awe and fear, in the unfledged mind. She fought, cajoled, scolded and loved. But all of it seemed so wonderful. I wished it would never end. But it did, that night.
I called her Rina, to the rest of the world she was Rashmi. Rashmi lives on; Rina died that night. As I laid her to rest in the depth of my heart and grieved, I knew that she had left behind a wealth of beautiful memories, wonderful moments, which would serve as my companion for the rest of my life. As I sat, staring out of my bus window, at the verdant fields yonder, her charming, smiling face floated in and out of my reverie. Every word she had said, remains indelibly etched in my memory.
Very few people get what they want in life, most don't. To the outside world they are a picture of joy, mirth and laughter, but the pain within, they suffer all alone.
The dark night is their invisible cocoon. It hides them, hides their tears and protects them from the prying eyes of the world, as they grieve.
And when the tears dry up, they get up and retrace their steps along that beaten track, that they have so often traveled, in their dreary lives. They walk, with the hope, that one day, just maybe, one day, someone will come along and hold their hand, in love, and walk along with them in their journey of life.
Being
a single parent is not easy, even in a big city, and a being a single father is
worse. “A man can never nurture”, it is said. No one is willing to give a man a
chance. He is bound by the societal streotypes of a bread earner and a
protector. He is often the the subject of the society gossip and the child
often subject to taunts and questions, answer to which he is too young to
contemplate. Conflicting emotions tears up the man everyday and at every step.
Should he be the caring and loving mother or the disciplinarian father? It is an
emotional mesh that tend to push him to the extremes in either direction.
It
was one of these battles that I was fighting that rainy evening. My five year
old son was impatiently pacing in the room, anxiously looking out of the window
for his playmates. It was pouring outside and he wanted to go out and play. The
mother in me did not want to let the boy out in the rain. After lot of cajoling
and promises, I agreed to let him go out and play with his friends on the
assurance that he will keep his raincoat on and avoid the puddles. He ran down
the steps of my fifth floor apartment, too excited to wait for the lift. I had
hardly settled down in my sofa to complete a long pending book, that I heard
his joyful shrieks. I thought of taking a peek out of the window to check on
him. There he was racing down the society walkway, on his bicycle, along with
the other kids of the society, drenched to the bone, his shirt sticking to his
body, raincoat long shed and forgotten. I shouted at him and commanded him to
come back home on the double.
He
stood at the door shivering in his wet clothes, scared and nervous about the
expected reprimand. I was scolded him as I rubbed him dry with a towel. He was
obviously sad on loosing out of the fun time with his friends. His question
disarmed me completely, “Baba, did you not play in the rain when you were my
age?” He ran inside, too cold to wait for an answer and too young to understand
contradiction of the adults.
When
I was his age, I not only got drenched in the rain, but also muddied my school
uniform playing in the rain and mud along with my friends. When I seek to
protect him, I was actually denying him the joys of childhood which he is so
entitled to. We adult spend too much time thinking, “what would happen if,” and
thus miss out on the small joys of life. When we correct your children we
forget how we craved to do exactly the same things as a child.
So you have cracked that snazzy B- school entrance exam, and you thought that the worst is finally over. Brace yourself ! The fun is just about to begin. You are about to enter a labyrinth you had never encountered before. Here you will need the skills of a kamikaze pilot to navigate through.
The B-school approach is distinctly different from what schools and colleges had previously taught you. Classroom teachings, as you had known, is replaced largely by self study. Focus is more on application of knowledge gained rather than reproduction of matter learned by rote. You are not limited by the boundaries of a syllabus. The more you know, the more you need to know. Worse, sometimes you need to unlearn all you had learned before and relearn. In short nothing you had done before prepares you for what you are going to experience in B-school. B-school is a motley crowd of poets, accountants and nerds. That's how the Arts, Commerce and Science graduate are referred to. Here Accounting and Finance are a challenge even for the accountants. While Organisational Behavior drives the nerds crazy, it is Market Research which gets the goat of the poets. But Marketing, overall, is always everyone's darling. Since the focus is on application, preparation of the course should begin even before the actual classes commence. Books must be sent to students well in advance. B-schools are expected to scan the resumes of it's students and advice them to work on their weak areas. Science and Arts graduates, particularly, must be asked to attend Accounting and Economic classes before the regular classes begin. Knowledge of Statistics and Calculus will also help. Those who seek to pursue a specialisation in Human Resources and Industrial Relations should have some knowledge of Corporate Laws. Prior work experience should be made mandatory. B- school experience could be exhilarating, hectic and draining. Your attitude and approach will decide what you will carry back from the college.
In 1947 India got it's independence, but in the process lost it's two limbs. There is a view that it was Nehru's ambition to become Prime Minister ahead of Jinnah which caused the nation to be partitioned. It triggered a mass migration, probably the largest in history, and caused the loss of thousands of lives.
Post partition Nehru and the Congress went about building democratic institutions that went to on to guide a nascent nation. To a large extent these institutions stood the test of time in a large, complex and diverse India.
But after Nehru's death, an young and insecure Indira went about systematically destroying the very edifices that her father and his colleagues had so painstakingly built. She broke the Congress and surrounded herself with sycophants who did not have any grass root base. They owed their position to Indira.
She twisted and mauled the constitution to impair the federal structure of the country and institutionalized corruption. Her policies finally boomeranged on her and became the cause of her death. Her son and the Congress did not learn their lessons. And today under the harsh glare of the 24x7 media, the Congress is coming off at the seams and the institutions have lost their credibility.
It will be a long and arduous road ahead to rebuilt the nation's faith in these institutions. But a tall and honest leader who has to lead the nation up this thorny path is nowhere to be seen.
Pain of a riots are never forgotten. The tears dry, but the throbbing pain remains. The wounds dry on the surface and only need a little poke to open up again. Can there ever be a reconciliation without justice done and seen to be done ?! Can there ever be a closure for the mother who has lost her son? A wife who has lost her husband ? A son who has seen his father butchered ? A woman whose dignity has been violated ? We can wish it gets hidden in some remote recess of the brain !! It doesn't happen. As a small child in 1979, I was unfortunate to see the ugly side of a communal riot in Jamshedpur. The Congress who claims moral high ground today has seen some of the worst riots during regime. Often under the stewardship of their demi God Indira Gandhi. This no way absolves the BJP of the atrocities committed during the 2002 riots in Gujrat. No amount of development can hide the ugly scars. Especially when there is no acknowledgement of the crimes committed, no regret expressed, no apology extended and no justice delivered. What keeps the wounds festering is the arrogant smugness of the government and the wheel of justice, which stubbornly refuses to move.
Few incidents in recent times has reflected this government's intolerance to dissent. The action against social networking sites, attempt to muzzle protest against nuclear installations and now arrest of a journalist for the blast in the Israeli embassy car.
We have seen repeated failure by Indian investigative agencies to deliver timely solutions to various acts of terrorism. Worse, they have gone on to falsely implicate citizens. These acts of omissions and commissions by the administration not only cause a dip in the already dwindling faith in the Indian system but also forments violent movements against the nation.
The government do well to nip these trends in the bud.
Saw a few sparrows and butterflies today. So rare nowadays!! Even the ubiquitous beehive is a rarity.
I remember the guava tree, in the corner of my garden, in my old house. It attracted a lot of parrots. Alas! the garden is not there anymore and so, gone is the guava tree and the chatter of the parrots. And that little blue bird....I never knew its name! The little yellow and violet flowers, do not dance in the summer breeze anymore. Gone also those rhododendron, petunias and that flame of the forest.
The onset of the monsoons heralded the croaking of the frogs and the swarms of dragon flies. I miss them !!
Will we ever see and hear them again?! Will this rapid urbanisation take away these little joys of life.........?! What have we gained and how much more have we lost...?! Can we ever balance the equation ?! I often ask myself, in my moments of solitude !!
India has again proved that it is a country of only lawmakers with no law enforcers. We have laws, we make few more and then make additional few more. We have world's one of the most amended constitution. Either the fathers of our constitution were not foresighted enough and had dome only a copy, paste job or our society is evolving too fast.
For a relatively young democracy, we have enough laws. But when it comes to implementation of these laws, we have a defunct machinery. This was proved all over again, when atrocities against the Jarawas tribals of Andaman and Nicobar islands, in clear violation of laws, was brought to light. What was more shocking was that Indians were humiliating fellow Indians for cheap thrills for some inhuman foreigners.
What is also important to note, is that, it was revealed by a foreign newspaper. We pride ourselves over a free, independent and vibrant fourth estate. But often the cameras of these powerful and rich media houses fail to roll beyond the boundaries of the NCR and a few state capitals. They are content to restrict themselves to reporting weather forecast and antics of few Delhi based politicos. When would they stop airing hand-downs from British and American networks and produce some quality news of their own.
No..no..it is not a conspiracy between KFC and VLCC, but obesity is a form of urban malnutrition. For a generation brought up on chips, cold drinks, pizzas, burgers and fried chicken....it is a potential health time bomb.
With growing urbanisation and increasing frequency of lifestyle disease, a larger allocation in the national budget will be towards health.
In contrast malnutrition in rural India is largely due to lack of sufficient nutrition. This is due to a combination of factors like cost of food, knowledge about nutrition etc.
So there is no uniform solution to national food and health
Imagine a a your world dominated by three devices 0 a smart phone, a tablet and a smart TV.
Your house will require no remote - your phone can switch on the TV, the ac, the geyser, the wqashing machine, microwave, can start your car and lock your door.
You don't need any music system, dvd player, ipod. You go on a holiday and you do not need to carry any credit card or debit card or camera....yes you guessed it, your phone will suffice.
You do not need any book, magazine or newspaper, you can read it all on your tablet. You can watch any movie you want to, listen to any music you want to, anytime you want to; your smart TV at your service.
you are returning from office and you can send a message to your ac and your geyser, a cool room and a hot shower is waiting for you. Life would be so convinient. And then..........
YOU LOOSE YOUR PHONE.......!!
All this could happen in 2012......watch this space....!!
I did a very strange thing today.
I posted a message to a friend of mine, on his wall. He will never read it. He had
died on the Diwali day.
And after I had joined a group of
his friends, in the virtual world, to pen a condolence message, in the only
place I could, on his facebook page, knowing fully well that it will probably, never
be read by any of his family members, I felt very uneasy. It made me shiver
We had stayed in the same city,
worked in the same company, spoke the same language, ate the same food, yet hardly
found time to meet or speak to each other. Today he is more.
There was a time, not very long
ago, when a telephone at home was a luxury for many. Yet we used to queue up at
the nearest STD booth to make a call or book a trunk call to speak to our near
and dear ones, at prohibit cost.
Today when it is so easy to make
a call, when almost every member of a family has one or more phones, we hardly talk
to family and friends. We don’t write letters but sent out short messages which
do not reflect any of our emotions. On rare occasions when friends come
together, everybody spent more time on their phones than talking to each other.
Two college students, sitting next to each other in a bus seat, do not talk to
each other but communicate through sms. So, has technology brought us closer or
driven us further apart?!
In this fast urban lifestyle and
in this mad scramble for success and money we have lost many of the small joys of
our lives. The meeting of friends, the long hours of adda, the laughter, the
joy of eating together, being part of each other’s joys and sorrows…..are only
dreams today.
But, however much the world may
change, however we may progress, nothing can substitute for the joy of seeing our
loved ones. The warmth of that hug, the tinkle of their laughter. The comfort
of knowledge that there is always someone to wipes your tears and lend a caring
shoulder to rest on.
So, everytime you think of
sending a sms to a friend or write a facebook post, spare a thought. Pickup the
phone and speak to him /her, or better still drop in and give him / her a hug;
because you never know, it could be the last time you would be doing that.
Banking around the world may now be passing through a major cyclical correction, but McKinsey research suggests that the industry’s revenues and profits will double by 2016.
With the midsummer credit crunch taking its toll, 2007 turned into a bleak year for the world’s big financial institutions, and 2008 may not be much better. As executives respond to the immediate pressures, however, they should maintain a clear perspective on the long-term outlook, which in our view is considerably brighter. Despite the current correction, we believe that during the next ten years the growth rate of the global banking industry will exceed that of GDP. Driven by powerful basic trends, such as demographics and the math of wealth accumulation, the industry will likely more than double its revenues and profits over the period.
Just as strikingly, McKinsey research also indicates that the industry’s patterns of growth will be diverse and uneven. Our comprehensive analysis of data since 2000 suggests that banking is one of the global economy’s few large industries that isn’t rapidly converging around a single structure or following the same market dynamics everywhere. Indeed, banking’s revenue performance has varied sharply and unexpectedly within regions, countries, subsectors, and product groups—and will continue to do so.
More than in other major industries, it appears, long-term success in banking hangs on being in the right place at the right time. Over the last ten years, for example, 88 percent of the growth in the revenues of Europe’s 20 largest banks was attributable to market momentum—in other words, competing in or entering territories and market segments that enriched everybody. Moreover, timing is critical. Buying into retail-banking markets across Asia in 2000 would have destroyed value over the next four years, as falling stock market multiples more than offset revenue growth. Buying into them in 2004, however, would have been richly rewarding.
In the text and exhibits that follow, we explore the global banking industry’s rich mosaic and highlight some of the core characteristics identified by our research. Our conclusions offer bank strategists and other senior executives a more detailed understanding of the size and composition of different banking markets, as well as insights into future profit trends.
Big and getting bigger
The industry with the largest profits . . .
In 2000, the global banking industry’s future looked decidedly downbeat: the Internet was widely expected to compress margins, thus disintermediating or even commoditizing many parts of the business. Banks mostly missed out on the stock market upturn that followed the dot-com debacle, though their empty M&A pipelines were partly to blame.
In retrospect, the gloom proved unwarranted. Global after-tax profits for banks soared to a historic high: from $372 billion in 2000 to $788 billion in 2006, or $672 billion in constant dollars. Along the way, banking became the industry with the highest absolute level of profits (Exhibit 1). In fact, those of US banks alone—$328 billion in 2006—were larger than the combined profits of the retailing, pharmaceutical, and automotive industries around the world. What’s more, in that year the banking industry’s profits per employee were estimated to be 26 times higher than the average of all other industries, and its $2.8 trillion in revenues equaled 6 percent of the global GDP.
. . . is set to double its revenues and profits by 2016
The recent stellar performance of the banking industry has, however, proved unsustainable in the short term—not surprising, given its cyclical nature. Corrections inevitably follow peaks, as we have seen from the events of Black Monday (1987) and the dot-com debacle (2001). That appears to be happening now, and the most recent estimates put the profit impact in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
While short-term movements are highly uncertain, the underlying long-term trends, we believe, are encouraging. The industry’s upward path should resume in due course thanks to demographic trends, wealth accumulation patterns, financial innovation, the rapid development of energy markets, and globalization.
Exhibit 2 shows that whatever happens in the next one or two years, global banking profits, as a proportion of total corporate profits, will probably remain at or above their historical high on a ten-year view. Furthermore, our base-case scenario indicates that global banking revenues will grow, on average, by a healthy 7.5 percent a year from 2006 to 2016, compared with an average of 8.0 percent a year from 2000 to 2006 (and 12.6 percent from 2002 to 2006). Although our ten-year projections show annual growth rates for revenues slowing somewhat, they still exceed current forecasts for GDP growth by more than one-half of a percentage point a year over the period. Consequently, we expect the industry to generate $5.7 trillion in revenues and $1.8 trillion in after-tax profits by 2016—more than twice the levels at the end of 2006.
Looking ahead, we project that emerging markets will contribute roughly half of the absolute growth in new banking revenues from 2006 to 2016, while North America and Western Europe will account for 25 and 20 percent, respectively. Russia, we believe, will continue to be one of the fastest-growing large markets in the next few years, and China will maintain its recent accelerated growth rates. In the next tier, certain other Asian countries, especially India, will overtake the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.
In the world as a whole, we expect the growth rates of retail assets and credits to converge as a result of the savings of the emerging middle classes of Asia, Central Europe, and Eastern Europe. Wholesale banking will probably undergo some restructuring in the next ten years, with investment banking, as well as sales and trading and securities services, providing a larger relative share of the revenues.
Diverse and likely to remain so
The growth of products and countries
Our analysis of the historical data highlights the striking diversity of banking around the world—something we expect to continue for the foreseeable future. Consider the growth patterns of specific countries. We find that revenues in developed ones not only accounted for the bulk of all banking revenues in absolute terms from 2000 to 2006 but also, excluding Japan, grew significantly faster than revenues in the world as a whole, in part thanks to the appreciating euro (Exhibit 3). The “BRIC” countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) were responsible for only 14 percent of the absolute global revenue growth in the six years to 2006, notwithstanding the drumbeat of expectations about growth in emerging markets during that period.
A look at growth rates presents a mixed picture, since Ireland, Russia, and Thailand posted some of the strongest results among individual countries. Interestingly, we found that from 2000 to 2006, banking revenues in Greece grew more rapidly than those in China; India was outpaced by Australia, and Latin America by the United States. At the same time, several markets—including Argentina (at –60 percent), Taiwan, and Turkey—suffered an absolute overall decline in revenues.
Growth also varied markedly by product category. In retail banking, for example, mortgages and asset management delivered double-digit growth from 2000 to 2006 in the world as a whole, while retail brokerage and deposits increased more slowly than inflation did.
Business mix
The mix of banking business in countries and regions varied significantly, we found, even among those at similar levels of economic development (Exhibit 4). On the one hand, retail banking represented a steady 60 to 70 percent of all revenues in most markets around the world from 2000 to 2006, but wholesale banking accounted for at least half of the industry’s revenues in China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Russia, and South Africa. On the other hand, Canada, Egypt, Japan, Pakistan, and South Korea rank among the world’s most retail-driven markets.
Further, the mix of businesses within retail banking also varied widely. In the United States, almost two-thirds of retail revenues in 2006 came from mortgages and consumer finance—the two elements of personal financial liabilities—though this will probably change after the crisis of mid-2007. In Western Europe, such products generally accounted for a little over one-third of all revenues. The differences among emerging markets are also noteworthy: Brazil and Ukraine seem to rely on retail lending more than the United States does, while many Asian countries tend to follow the pattern of Western Europe. To take one product, in 2006 the share of credit cards in total retail revenues ranged from 23 percent in Turkey to just over half a percent in Germany; the global average was 7 percent.
Wholesale banking is similarly diverse. In 2006, only 30 percent of US wholesale-banking revenues came from lending to and deposits from large corporations and small and midsize enterprises, 47 percent from corporate banking as a whole. In the United States, investment banking, asset management, and related revenues towered over everything else. In most other countries, however, corporate banking accounted for at least half of all revenue pools in wholesale banking—91 percent in Japan, 88 percent in Turkey, and 74 percent in Latin America, for example. Notably, these ratios have stayed remarkably constant over the past six years.
Growth drivers
Banking may be a leveraged bet on the economy, but the extent of the leverage and the part of the economy on which it is focused vary significantly (Exhibit 5). In addition to economic cycles, banking is a play on sociodemographic patterns and on trends in financial accumulation, both often influenced in turn by culture and government regulation. As became painfully apparent during the summer of 2007, for example, a big jump in household borrowing was largely responsible for the growth of US retail-banking revenues from 2000 to 2006—indeed, it explains 70 percent of the increase.
In Germany, however, household borrowing contributed only 4.7 percent of the total growth of retail revenues from 2000 to 2006; the rest came mainly from new savings and from returns on existing savings. Germany’s banking revenues increased by 4.9 percent in US dollar terms. As in most other continental European countries, a strong currency was a key driver.
The impact of demographic and socioeconomic forces was far greater elsewhere. Take India, where population trends and rising salaries played almost as big a part in the growth of retail-banking revenues as savings and lending did. Together, all four drivers more than offset a $4.4 billion decline in deposit margins from 2000 to 2006.
Capital market multiples
Exhibit 6 calls to mind the fact that the annual growth of a bank’s investment value is its after-tax profit increase adjusted for changes in market multiples. Regional multiples, which often change relative to one another in response to investor sentiment, may add to or detract from an individual institution’s underlying performance.
Such considerations will be significant when banks return in earnest to M&A, as we believe they will. Our research suggests that the growth in banking revenues and profits expected during the next ten years should create $12 trillion in new market capitalization—a huge opportunity for players around the world.
Over the next five years, we expect a new wave of consolidation to speed the emergence of “superbanks,” with more than $500 billion in market capitalization. Today, however, global banking is the least concentrated large industry; the top 20 banks account for less than 40 percent of its global market cap, compared with an average of 67 percent in other key industries. Even the current top European and US banks aren’t guaranteed to achieve superbank status with their existing portfolios.
In our view, the winners will outshine their competitors by developing better insights into the diversity among markets and the nature of the trade-offs between risks and returns. A superior understanding of the fundamentals that drive value should help these banks exploit short-term cyclicality to their long-term advantage.
The Problems faced by citizens in Pune - 1. High Pollution 2. Poor Public Transport. 3. Poor connectivity 4. Buses poorly maintained. 5. Autos refuses to take passengers late at night and for short distance. Buses do not stop at all stops. 6. Excess congestion due to large number of Vehicle on road 7. Traffic rules not implemented strongly.
suggested Solutions :
1.There should be immediate effort to shift all buses and autos to CNG 2. Introduce CNG taxis like Mumbai 3. Allow private players to ply CNG buses - follow the Kolkata model. This will ensure more routes being served, more buses, better customer service and more bus hubs, so less congestion 4. Immediate effort to start Delhi like extensive metro connectivity. This will encourage people to use their bixes and cars less. 5. Start BRTS AC buses.
If citizens are provided better quality of public transport, better and quiker connectivity 24x7. It will to bring down the pollution and congestion and happier citizen. Pune is now far behind. Urgent action is required.
The government recently in an affidavit to the Supreme Court of India cited ` 32 per head per day as BPL (below poverty line) indicator. Ie. If a person spends `33 in a day, he would not be entitled to the BPL benefits.
Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the chairman of the planning commission, in a press conference, tried to assuage the concern of the nation on this absurd figure. He along with Jairam Ramesh, union minister for rural development, clarified that the figure of `32 will not affect any policy decision. They also said that, while arriving at the figure, it was assumed that the health and education cost will be borne by the state and `32 was for expenses other than the cost of education and health.
This brings me to an actual case study, reported by The Times of India (TOI). It was a case of cycle rickshaw driver, who is from Bihar, and runs his rickshaw in Delhi. This gentleman, lets call him Neeraj Sangal, manages two meals a day and sleeps in the pavement. His meal consists of 8 rotis and a plate of sabzi. His family of wife and three children, stays in his village in Bihar. At the cost of `2/ roti and `15 for a plate of sabzi, one meal costs him `31, so two meal would be `62.
So if we consider the basic needs of Roti, Kapra and Makaan, and not including health and education, Mr Neeraj Sangal’s per day requirement, for only food, is almost double the government’s BPL limit. So Mr Neeraj Sangal is not “sufficiently” poor, to get a BPL ration card.
My niece is up in arms. Her morning schedule has been upset. The weather Gods have failed her again.
Unlike me, she has a very organised and tight schedule. On top of that she was not able to find her favourite Blackberry and Android phones. She has more use of them than us, regular users.
She is an early riser. Not that she goes to bed early, she too busy for that. Her morning starts with stroll in the para (neighborhood) with grandpa, it is followed by breakfast with her mom and then another scrutiny of the neighbourhood. Then she has to see off her parents to the door as they leave for office.
Once these mundane morning chores are done, she spends some time with mobiles and such assorted gizmos. No, she has no time for the idiot box and see no reason why anybody else should have either. By now she is joined by her elder sister and brother, who have returned from school, and then together they move on to meet her dida (grandma) next door. Who has to ensure that some quality time is set aside for her ladyship. Any stupid questions like how is she, where is she going, what is she doing etc. is treated with a diplomatic smile and giggle. Then it is already time for lunch and her afternoon siesta.
The evenings are no less busy. It is spend in PR exercise. Evening walk with grandpa and meeting neighbors, visiting houses of assorted didas, dadas and didis. Followed by a late dinner, when she finally gets some time.
You can't possibily expect a busier schedule for a eight months old.
