Congress brass goes to Delhi

The Chief Minister, Mr K. Rosaiah, and the PCC chief Mr D. Srinivas, and scores of other Congress leaders, including ministers, left for New Delhi on Wednesday night amidst reports of a Cabinet reshuffle and selection of candidates for the ensuing Legislative Council polls.

Mr Rosaiah, who will attend the Chief Ministers’ conference convened by the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, on the price rise issue on Thursday, will take the opportunity to meet the Congress president, Ms Sonia Gandhi, to seek her approval for the reshuffle proposals.

It was evident on Wednesday evening, soon after the scheduled cabinet meeting was over, all the ministers followed the Chief Minister to his chambers and each one tried to meet him for a while to express their loyalty fearing some of them may loose their jobs in the proposed cabinet reshuffle.

Not only that all the ministers waited for the Chief Minister to complete his one-on-one meetings and again followed him downstairs to see him off.

The Chief Minister is expected return from Delhi either with approval for the reshuffle or an indication to defer the exercise for now. He is believed to have been advised against going for changes in the Cabinet to avoid trouble from those who would be dropped and from disappointed aspirants.

But, Mr Rosaiah, according to sources, has decided to brief Mrs Gandhi on the pros and cons and follow her decision.

Mr Srinivas also left for Delhi to attend meetings on the organisational elections. He is also expected to meet Mrs Gandhi and seek her nod on his contest the Hyderabad local body seat in the ensuing Council polls.

The former minister, Mr Shabbir Ali, member in the AP Congress coordination panel, is very much in the race for the seat. Both these leaders are from Nizamabad and considered non-locals for the local body elections.

The decision of the Congress president on the fate of Mr Srinivas will also decide his future plans of joining the Rosaiah cabinet as deputy Chief Minister.

Mr Srinivas is expected to talk to the leadership on the nature of the report he has to submit to the Justice Srikrishna panel on the state bifurcation. The Congress has not come out openly on its stand on bifurcation issue so far. But, when the Srikrishna panel wrote to party presidents to spell out their stand on the issue, Mr Srinivas announced that he would submit a report with the advise of the high command. If that will happen, the Congress party stand on Telangana issue would be known for the first time.

Major fire in Delhi shoe factory

A major fire broke out in a shoe factory in the city early on Friday morning fire brigade officials said. The blaze was reported from the factory located in Udhyog Vihar in Peeragarhi at around 5:20 am.

Thirty-two fire tenders were rushed to the spot to douse the fire.

No joint statements after Indo-Pak talks

Thursday’s talks between the foreign secretaries of India and Pakistan is not expected to yield a joint statement.

For New Delhi, the meeting between Ms Nirupama Rao and her Pakistan counterpart Mr Salman Bashir, who arrived here on Wednesday, would be a reasonable success if Islamabad were to recognise the “trust deficit” between the two countries and respond by taking steps, however small, so that the possibility of future dialogue is not undermined.

The differences over the ambit and nature of talks persist, with Islamabad maintaining that Kashmir will be a priority for its delegation and New Delhi reiterating that it would like to focus on the issue of cross-border terrorism.

Sources here sought to play down expectations of any significant outcome from the talks.

A source said New Delhi was conscious of the limitations imposed by the “trust deficit” following the 26/11 Mumbai attacks.

The source stated that given the complexities involved, the Indian side would definitely use the opportunity of discussions to clear the air as much as possible.

JDU MLA caught on camera dancing with bar girls(Live Vedio)

In a major embarrassment for the Janata Dal United (JD-U) and Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, party legislator from Jiradei, Shyam Bahadur Singh was caught on camera doing vulgar dance moves with bar dancers.

Bar dancers were called for the party event at the MLA's house in Patna. The dance was meant to entertain the crowd and consolidate Dalit votes.

The MLA was the one having most fun.

However, Shyam Bahadur has apologised for his act.

“I am sorry, I made a mistake, said Singh.

Live Vedio :click here 

Indian media & entertainment industry to touch Rs. 1.15 lakh cr mark by 2012

The Indian media and entertainment industry is poised to touch Rs. 1,15,700 crore by 2012, driven by increased advertising spend.

“The Indian media and entertainment industry is growing at a pace of 19 per cent per annum. It is expected to touch Rs. 1,157 billion by 2012,” Information and Broadcasting Minister Ambika Soni said at the 16th International BES EXPO 2010.

She added that television viewership is also expected to grow to 132 million over the same period of time from 115 million viewers in 2007.

With rising consumer spends, advertising revenues for broadcasters has also seen a surge over the last few years.

This, along with relaxation of the FDI norms, has resulted in a spurt of TV channels, including niche channels.

Technologies like Direct To Home (DTH) and IPTV have also contributed to the growth of the sector.

It is cheaper to offshore jobs

The U.S. President Barack Obama, on Thursday, said that he would end tax breaks to American firms that shipped jobs out of the country.

Will India, which is known as the world’s back-office, suffer the most by this move?

According to software services industry body Nasscom, the IT sector accounts for 5.8 per cent of India’s gross domestic product in 2008-09, up from 1.2 per cent in 1997-98.

Though the objective of the move is to arrest the flow of jobs out of America, industry sources aren’t quite sure if the move will have the desired impact? If the U.S. Government disallows offshoring costs as expenses in the books of the U.S. companies, it will increase the cost of offshoring by 35 to 40 per cent for the U.S. firms.
Cost competitiveness

The on-site or onshore cost of a starting level engineer in an IT company is about $50 to 60 an hour. The correspondent cost for the same job if done offshore either in India or China works out to around $25-30 an hour. Assuming that the U.S. Government actually disallows offshore payments as expenses, then the cost of offshoring will go up. Industry experts estimate that the offshoring cost in that event could go up to $35-45. Still it is cheaper for the U.S. companies to offshore jobs to locations such as India or China.

Industry sources aver that the move could at best result in stoppage of fresh flow of transitional works from the U.S. into India and other countries which do offshoring. However, they are of the view that it will not result in any pull-back of jobs already shipped out of the U.S. Nevertheless, they agreed that the move could trigger some hard bargaining by the U.S. companies to hammer down offshoring prices, which could impact the top line and bottomline of IT companies in India and China which are America-centric in their businesses. Industry observers predict that Obama’s move may prod the Indian IT firms to look beyond the U.S. and explore business opportunities in Europe and elsewhere.
Commercial decisions

According to Ameet Nivsarker, Vice-President of Nasscom, the move is all about the American companies which have set up their outfits in lower tax areas and booking profits. In any case, the tax difference between India and the U.S. is very minimal. According to Chief Financial Officer of Hinduja Gobal Solutions Ltd., Anand Vora, “companies outsourcing are doing it based on financial implications and cost structures. The decisions are commercial and based on economic implications.”

Higher vegetable prices push up food inflation

After dipping marginally for a few weeks in a row, food inflation changed tack yet again to move up to 17.40 per cent for the week ended January 16 from 16.81 per cent in the previous week, mainly on account of higher prices of eggs and vegetables.

The official data on wholesale prices of primary food articles and fuels, coming as it did a day ahead of the third quarterly review of credit policy on Friday, dashed all hopes of any early respite from high food inflation which had touched its 10-year peak of close to 20 per cent in December last.

In the event, although the current bout of food inflation is more of a supply-side problem, the Reserve Bank of India is likely to signal a further monetary tightening by hiking some of the key policy rates to suck out excess liquidity and thereby rein inflation.

The general expectation among analysts is that the apex bank would raise the cash reserve ratio (CRR) — the chunk of deposits that banks are mandated to park with the RBI — by at least 50 basis points so as to suck out more than Rs.20,000 crore from the money in circulation. Alongside, there could also be a marginal increase of about 25 basis points in the repo (short-term lending to banks by RBI) and reverse repo (short term borrowing) rates to signal a staggered exit from the soft money policy.

Such a step is deemed necessary as there are chances of the high food inflation seeping into the manufacturing and other sectors and thereby lead to a surge in overall inflation.

Flight operations normal at IGI airport in New Delhi

After remaining disrupted for almost a week due to dense fog, flight operations at the IGI airport were normal on Monday.

“Air operations were normal and all flights were operating as per schedule as there was no fog and the visibility remained over 2,000 metres at the airport early in the morning,” an airport official said.

The runway visibility was above 2,000 metres on Sunday night and early Monday morning but it dropped to a low of 1,300 metres after 7 am as shallow fog descended on the airport, a Met official said.

Though shallow fog did not cause any disruption to flight movement, one flight each of Jet airways and Jetlite was cancelled while few others were delayed due to operational reasons.

In view of the foggy conditions, some international carriers have already rescheduled their flights.

Thick fog had badly affected air operations at the IGI airport for the past six days, leading to cancellation of 85 flights and delaying around 780 others.