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Monday, March 9, 2009

Vol.3

No.58

Rs. 3.00

24 PAGES

Kishore Biyani on the future of retailing >7

Q&A:

MONEY MATTERS: The mutual funds that weathered the storm >20-21 THE NATIONAL AGENDA: Pratap Bhanu Mehta on creating a credible state >23

EXCLUSIVE PARTNER

SENSEX 8,325.82 ®

NIFTY 2,620.15 ®

What’s inside A steep fall in oil prices and the non-usage of some rigs has put pressure on India’s largest offshore oil drilling contractor Aban Offshore Ltd’s ability to repay loans taken from banks. The firm may have to reschedule some portion of the Rs15,968 crore of debt that is due to mature this year and the next. >P6

LEADING THE NEWS After the attacks on the Sri Lankan team in Lahore, watching cricket in the subcontinent will not be the same, says Anil Padmanabhan. >P5 *** Beleaguered domestic carriers are paring the salaries of pilots and engineers, giving West Asian carriers an opportunity to tap talent from India. >P2

MONEY MATTERS The US will rule world markets this week and it will be worth watching the dollar index, which is showing signs of peaking, says Vipul Verma. >P15 *** Can RBI be more bold and cut the policy rate to zero? It can, through the back door, says Tamal Bandyopadhyay. >P6

DOLLAR Rs51.69 ®

EURO Rs65.76 ®

NDA EQUATIONS

Tata Nano may take Pune route

Allies may gain as BJD dumps BJP

Nariman Point last week got tagged as the world’s sixth most expensive office location, but the business district has been reeling under falling rentals, rising vacancies. >P8 *** A survey shows some Indian firms want to implement flexible benefits in order to retain their best talent. >P8

VIEWS The US and China have acted aggressively to fight the financial crisis. But that may not work in the long run unless the basic economic models of the two nations are rejigged. >P22

ELECTION SURVEY Ahead of the polls, Mint will publish the results of a nationwide survey by Marketing and Development Research Associates on factors that could influence voter preferences. The sixpart series begins Tuesday.

QUICK EDIT

Musharraf and alienation A s always, Pervez Musharraf has got it wrong. The former president of Pakistan, on a visit to India these days, created ripples while speaking to a Delhi audience on Saturday night. The general reportedly made a comment that one of the reasons for terrorism in India was the sense of alienation felt by Muslims in the country. He received a rebuke from a leader present on the occasion. Musharraf was told that India’s Muslims could solve their own problems. The point may be hard to understand for an individual

who as a senior Pakistani military leader believed that Kashmir could be wrested from India by force of arms. One can be sure that such wrong-headed notions had a role to play in the support to terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir. In hindsight, is it any surprise that the Kashmir “problem” could not be solved while he was at the helm of affairs in Pakistan? His remarks should not be viewed as those of an individual alone. He comes from an institution that refuses to believe that Jammu and Kashmir is a part of India.

Mint is also available for Rs4.75 with Hindustan Times under a combo offer

Infosys bucks trend, absorbs all offered jobs B Y P OORNIMA M OHANDAS [email protected]

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ndia’s second largest software services provider by revenue, Infosys Technologies Ltd, says it has completed absorbing all 20,000 engineering students who graduated last year and to whom it had made job offers on campus. The induction process was delayed by several months because of the global economic crisis that deepened last year, forcing overseas clients to pare technology budgets and delay projects in an attempt to cut spending. Infosys inducted the new graduates in batches into its training programme starting June 2008 and finished the process by the end of February, company officials said. Typically, companies recruit engineering students in the November-January period through the campus placement process. Students pass out in June and join these firms for work in June-August. Tata Consultancy Services Ltd, the country’s biggest software services provider, and No. 3 Wipro Technologies are yet to complete the induction

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be able to produce enough of the cars at its Pantnagar plant in Uttarakhand. Top officials are concerned enough to consider supplementing production with an additional assembly line in Pune, said two persons familiar with the situation who didn’t want to be named.

RAMESH PATHANIA/MINT

Auto maker weighs a new assembly line on land leased till recently to Mercedes-Benz to boost production

he country’s biggest auto maker, Tata Motors Ltd, is considering setting up a new assembly line for the Nano in Pune, seeking to scale up production to meet anticipated demand for the Rs1 lakh small car that launches on 23 March. Bookings for the so-called “people’s car”, billed as the world’s cheapest, open in the second week of April. The move comes amid worries that Tata Motors may not

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ot only is the decision of the Biju Janata Dal, or BJD, to snap ties with the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, a setback to the Hindu nationalist party’s poll fortunes and the prime ministerial aspirations of L.K. Advani, it is also a leg up for the third political alternative being cobbled by the Left. A diminished BJP would now find it more difficult to resist pressure from its alliance partner in Bihar, the Janata Dal (United), or JD(U), to settle for fewer parliamentary seats than what it had contested in 2004. Chief minister Nitish Kumar has put off any announcement on the seat sharing until after the festival of Holi on Wednesday. On Sunday, a day after he ended the 11-year-old alliance with the BJP, the main opposition party at the Centre, Orissa chief minister and BJD chief Naveen Patnaik signalled that he was not averse to joining the so-called Third Front, the non-BJP, non-Congress political grouping.

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The current UPA government will leave behind the largest-ever combined fiscal deficit in India’s history, and with it, a series of missed opportunities to advance administrative and economic reforms. >P4

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Big ambitions: Tata Nano.

Only 2 women in Left Front’s Bengal list B Y R OMITA D ATTA [email protected]

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he Left Front, which has been pushing for the reservation of onethird of the seats in Parliament for women, has fielded only two women out of 42 candidates in West Bengal for the Lok Sabha elections. In 2004, the Left Front had fielded five women from the state, known as a staunch Leftist bastion, and three of them won. But this time, it has retained only two of the three women who had won in 2004. Both candidates—Jyotirmoyee Sikdar and Sushmita Bauri—are from the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPM, the Left Front’s largest TURN TO PAGE 3®