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It has become fashionable in certain circles to deride anything and everything that pertains to India's public sector. When there is something positive to be said about a public sector undertaking, such news tends to be relegated to the background. The recent experience of the Hyderabad-based Electronics Corporation of India Limited shatters quite a few myths about the so-called slothful and inefficient manner in which PSUs are supposed to function. After earning profits for six years in a row...

Faced with mounting reserves of hard currency, the Reserve Bank of India has taken a few tentative steps towards capital account convertibility. On the first day of November, the country's central bank and apex monetary authority allowed resident Indians to maintain bank accounts in foreign currency under certain conditions. The new facility, known as the Resident Foreign Currency (Domestic) account, would be in the form of a current account with a bank that is also a licensed dealer in foreign...

Who controls the management of India's largest cement manufacturing corporate entity, ACC Limited (formerly Associated Cement Companies)? This question was given a new twist on Friday, October 25. On that day, the Securities Appellate Tribunal directed the watchdog of the country's capital markets, the Securities and Exchange Board of India, to examine whether the Gujarat Ambuja group had gained management control over ACC after a controversial acquisition of 14.45 per cent of the company's...

The controversy over the privatisation and the attempted resale of Centaur Hotel, located near Mumbai's airport at Santa Cruz, has highlighted the flawed manner in which public sector undertakings are valued before being put up for sale. What is worse, the Centaur Hotel episode indicates how a laudable attempt at getting the government out of the hospitality business - where it has no business to be in - can degenerate into the worst form of crony capitalism. The episode has already sparked off...

Balmer Lawrie is an unusual public sector undertaking. To start with, the company is 135 years old and has no less than 18 completely unrelated business divisions that, among other things, organise tours, blend tea, manufacture lubricants and operate container freight stations. Despite the opposition of a section within the Union ministry of petroleum and natural gas, the government-owned company is on the verge of being privatised. Petroleum Minister Ram Naik, who was himself at one stage in...

India's capital is unique in one respect. It is the only urban area in the world with more than a dozen English newspapers published daily. No, it's not London or New York or Washington or Los Angeles, but New Delhi that has the largest number of small, medium and large English newspapers that come out every day. The other cities have loads of periodicals, not dailies. This fact has evidently nothing to do with the population of English-speaking individuals in the country's national capital...

'The fruits of globalisation have not filtered down to the common masses of the country.' This statement was not made by a leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or, for that matter, any other political party. Nor was it made by a Left-leaning liberal, sporting a jhola (cloth sling bag). No, this pronouncement did not come from an academic from the Capital's Jawaharlal Nehru University who wears his concern for the underprivileged on the sleeve of his trendy kurta, while he sips his...

Most economists - and I include myself in this category - often wax eloquent about the need to uplift those living below the poverty line, to provide the poor and the underprivileged a very small portion of what the rich take for granted in their everyday lives. But few of us seem to realise how the other half manages to survive on so little. Six billion individuals inhabit this planet. Over one billion are between the ages fifteen and twenty-four. An estimated 85 per cent of the youth of the...

BAT -British American Tobacco - is a UK-based multinational corporation. ITC used to be called India Tobacco Company and before that, Imperial Tobacco Company. It is India's largest manufacturer of cigarettes with a whopping market share. It also owns and runs hotels, manufactures paperboard and exports handicrafts and agricultural commodities. For over a decade now, BAT has been lasciviously eyeing the management of ITC, a company in which it holds 32.5 per cent of the share capital. In recent...

A committee of secretaries to the Government of India headed by Cabinet Secretary T R Prasad has sent a proposal for privatisation of Hindustan Organic Chemicals Limited to the department of expenditure in the ministry of finance. Behind this apparently innocuous decision lies a curious tale of politicking and lobbying, of twists and turns that have plagued - and continue to plague - the government's programme of privatising public sector undertakings like HOCL. One section of the bureaucracy...