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| Tuesday, January 2, 2001, Chandigarh, India   
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MP stops free electricity to farmers Exports surge 21 pc during April-Nov Sinha faces tough task Consumers pay 435 cr in excess GM, Toyota, Exxon plan fuel-cell car
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| Future is still bright for web GM car sales up
New millennium begins on optimistic note
Atalji.com a superhit Give the keys, keep wife!
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| MP stops free electricity to farmers BHOPAL, Jan 1 (PTI) — The Madhya Pradesh State Electricity Board will start implementing from today the state government decision to stop free supply of electricity to around 40 lakh farmers and those having one-point connections in urban slums. Board sources said following this, its annual revenue was expected to go up by roughly Rs 600 crore. There will now be two slabs for those using agricultural pumps for irrigation and under the first slab for those not having any meters, the farmers using pumps with less than three horse power capacity will be charged a flat rate of Rs 50 per month. Farmers using pumps with capacity between three horse power and 10 horse power will be charged Rs 60 per horse power per month while those using pumps with capacity between 10 horse power and 20 horse power will be charged Rs 70 per horse power per month, the sources said. Under the second slab, for those pumps equipped with meters, the farmers would have to pay Re 1 per unit and a maintenance charge of Rs 5 per horse power. This would be charged irrespective of whether there is electricity supply or not or whether the farmers use the electricity or not. Free electricity to the farmers and those having one-point connections would now be available only to those belonging to Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes. Apart from considerably reducing the number of farmers who used to get free electricity, the MPSEB would now not provide free electricity for one-point connections in around 26 lakh slums all over the state. Since it would not be possible to give meters to all these consumers at one go, till the time the meters are provided, those having one-point connections would be charged on the basis of bulbs or tubelights used by them, the sources said. The MPSEB does not provide electricity to illegal slum and it has now been decided to give connections there on payment of an instalment of Rs 300 for 28 months at a stretch. Initially, electronic meters would be installed for big consumers and their old meters would be given to those living in urban slums. Also, from today a programme would be launched to discard connections for which no money has been paid. Apart from this, the board is also implementing a new captive power policy for industrial units under which they would be able to produce on their own 50 per cent of the electricity needed by them. |
| Exports surge 21 pc during April-Nov NEW DELHI, Jan 1 (UNI) — India further reduced its trade deficit with exports showing 20.56 per cent growth and imports remaining subdued at 14.44 per cent during April-November, 2000-2001, over the same period last year. The official trade data released today said cheers to the year 2001 and showed that exports during the first eight months of the current financial year were valued at $ 28.60 billion against $ 23.73 billion during April-November 1999-2000. Imports, on the other hand, remained subdued with a growth of 14.44 per cent at $ 30.40 billion. As a result the trade deficit was lower at $ 6177.23 million in the period under review against $ 6668.02 million in the comparable months of the previous year. In rupee terms, exports were Rs 12,959.74 crore showing a growth of 26.17 per cent over April-November 1999-2000. Oil imports during April-November 2000-2001, valued at $ 11347.14 million, increased by 82.96 per cent over the same period last year. Significantly, the oil imports during April-October had shown a growth of 84.51 per cent. In November, 2000, exports were valued at $ 3.53 billion which is 20.31 per cent higher than the level of $ 2.94 billion in the comparable month last year. Likewise, imports in November were of the value of $ 4.49 billion, an increase of 18.42 per cent over $ 3.79 billion in November, 1999. The Ministry of Commerce and Industry has set an export target of 18 per cent for the current financial year. If the trend up to November continues, the target may even be exceeded, officials said. Non-oil imports showed a decline of 3.13 per cent at $ 23.43 billion in April-November, 2000-2001 over $ 24.19 billion in this period last year. Experts attribute the decline in the non-oil imports to slow growth of the economy. |
| Sinha faces tough task NEW DELHI, Jan 1 — A damp stock market, a falling rupee compounded by a steadily rising rate of inflation, downward revision of growth estimates and a none-too-impressive performance of the manufacturing sector indicate that the Indian economy is not in the pink of health and the Finance Minister faces a tough task while preparing the Budget. Defying estimates of market optimists, the BSE Sensex failed to breach the 6,000 mark barrier and instead at the end of the year was struggling at the levels of 3,900 points during December 2000. The markets continued to remain subdued on account of a thin strip of positive sentiment over oil prices, adequate liquidity in the market and lack of buying interest for the greenbacks. Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha with a fresh team of experts at North Block have a delicate job in preparing the Budget for 2001-02. While direct tax collections for the current fiscal are largely on targeted levels, available indications suggest that indirect tax collections are unlikely to meet. Overall direct tax collections upto November have been very impressive. The direct tax collections registered a 57.08 per cent increase in November by touching Rs 26.31 billion compared to Rs 16.74 billion last year. There has been a steady decline in the exchange rate of rupee with the dollar currently trading at over Rs 46. Amid this discouraging picture, the performance of the exports sector presents a silver lining a growth rate of 20.51 per cent during the first seven months of the current fiscal. India’s exports during this period stood at $ 25.01 billion as against $ 20.76 billion during the corresponding period of the previous year. Imports grew relatively slowly at 14 per cent. However, at this point of time India’s trade deficit is estimated to be $ 5.26 billion, which is lower than $ 5.80 billion in the corresponding months of the previous year. The declining growth rate of industrial production continued during October, with the general index of industrial production rising by only 5.7 per cent during the first seven months of the fiscal as compared to a 6.7 per cent rise during April-October, 1999. The annual point to point inflation rate based on the wholesale price index has also been steadily rising over the last few months and for the first time in two years crossed the 8 per cent level in December, 2000. The toughest challenge that Mr Sinha faces is that of ensuring that the impressive targets set by government do not go haywire due to several exogenous factors such as international prices of crude oil. The highly volatile trend in the international prices of oil has implied that India’s import bill is expected to reach over Rs 800 billion this year against Rs 535 billion last year. The demand for oil and gas in India is growing at an annual rate of 6-7 per cent compared to the world average rate of 2 per cent. |
| Consumers pay 435 cr in excess NEW DELHI, Jan 1 (PTI) — Taking serious exception to “overcharging” of consumers under public distribution system (PDS), the Comptroller and Auditor General has said they were charged Rs 435.71 crore in excess, defeating the goal of providing wheat and rice at uniform and affordable prices. “The consumers were charged Rs 435.71 crore in excess due to passing on extra expenditure to them instead of absorbing from state budgets .... thus, the main objective of providing wheat and rice at the uniform and affordable rate was not fulfilled,” said CAG’s latest report on food and consumer affairs. In Tamil Nadu, the consumers were overcharged by Rs 251.44 crore due to passing on the retail margins to them for foodgrains and kerosene oil, though the charges were to be borne by the state government. Similarly in Gujarat and Tripura, Rs 64.47 crore and Rs 5.20 crore, respectively, were overcharged from the consumers on account of recovery of additional handling charges, it said. The report said the state governments were allowed to add handling and transportation charges plus dealers’ commission over and above the central issue price in determining the consumer end retail price. One of the important decisions taken by the Ministry of Food and Consumer Affairs with regard to revamped PDS was that the CIP of wheat and rice per quintal was to be less by Rs 50 in RPDS blocks as compared to the price of these commodities supplied under the normal PDS. The report said under RPDS, out of an additional subsidy of Rs 50 per quintal, at least Rs 25 per quintal was to be passed on to the consumer directly and the remaining was to be utilised for transportation and handling charges. The consumer end retail price of foodgrains in identified areas had to be more or less uniform throughout the country and was not to exceed the especially subsidised CIP of these commodities for the identified RPDS areas. |
| GM, Toyota, Exxon plan fuel-cell car TOKYO, Jan 1 (AFP) — Japan’s Toyota Motor Corp., General Motors Corp. of the USA and the oil major Exxon Mobil Corp. jointly plan to develop environment-friendly cars powered by fuel cells, a report said today. The three firms are in the final phase of talks on plans to start marketing their fuel-cell cars in 2003 at the earliest, the major Japanese daily Yomiuri Shimbun said. Fuel cells, which produce electricity by combining hydrogen and oxygen, are seen by some as likely to replace the internal combustion engine in the 21st century. The new fuel-cell cars will be powered by gasoline-derived hydrogen which is subsequently used to generate electricity, the newspaper said. There are no international standards for the fuel-cell cars, and the three-way alliance aims to take the lead in the field, Yomiuri said. DaimlerChrysler AG is developing fuel cells with a methanol method that uses natural gas. Toyota and General Motors account for about 30 per cent of the global car market and they hope to win the lion’s share of the fuel-cell vehicle market. They had first tried to develop fuel cells that directly use hydrogen or a method that, extracts hydrogen from methanol. | |||||
Future is still bright for web LONDON: Those who would forget history are condemned to repeat it. Readers of the lurid accounts of the Great Internet Bubble of 2000 could be forgiven for thinking that this was a folly unique in human history, rather than just one of those periodic outbursts of irrational exuberance to which humans with more money than sense are prone. And as the bubble burst, irrational exuberance gave way to an equally irrational pessimism, and a conviction in some quarters that the whole technology thing was really just a passing fad, with the result that even serious, well-managed companies such as Cisco, Microsoft and Sun have seen their stock market valuations plummet. The business world reckons that the Net is the Next Big Thing, but few have yet figured out a viable way of making serious money from it. Many of those who thought they had it sussed have already gone bust, or are in the process of doing so. According to the London-based Economist newspaper, 60 of the biggest Internet firms have seen their share price fall by 90 per cent from their March 2000 peaks, and hundreds more have fallen by more than half. Accordingly, the stock options customarily offered to dotcom employees in lieu of proper salaries are now rarely worth the paper they’re printed on, bringing a totally new interpretation to the phrase `negative equity’. And the original quick-exit route for dotcom investors — the stock market flotation or IPO, which converted stock holdings and options into real money — has effectively been closed off. Cancellations of forthcoming IPOs now exceed new listings. And the Nasdaq has gone through the floor. Does all this matter? No and yes. No, because the bankruptcy of half-baked fantasy firms does not constitute a definitive test of anything. Some of the most spectacular dotcom failures of 2000 were basket cases, managerially speaking, whose only measure of performance seemed to be their `burn rate’ - the speed with which they got through investors’ money. Boo.com, an aspirant fashion etailer, consumed $ 185 million in 18 months and never even managed to get its site working properly. British visitors to San Francisco start-ups returned with awed tales of executive prodigality. They told of one company which employed FedEx to move parcels from one floor of its building to another. Or of a senior manager in another firm who ordered Mont Blanc pens by the gross because he `kept losing them’. Publicity surrounding the collapse of such preposterous enterprises has diverted attention from the radical economic and social changes being brought about by the Net. So yes, all this stuff does matter. Even in the uncool area of online retailing, companies such as Amazon continue to change the commercial landscape. Ask any bricks-and-mortar bookseller. As Bill Davidow, a prominent US venture capitalist, remarked recently: “There was a tulip business even after the tulip mania.” The Internet is bringing far-reaching changes to our economy, in the form of new ways of doing business, greater productivity in important sectors, lower transaction costs as buyers and sellers come together without the intervention of middlemen, new exchanges in which everything from electricity to broadband capacity can be traded efficiently, and increased consumer the power to resist price rises. So whatever happens to dotcoms, the commercial world will increasingly adopt the Net, and anyone who wants to do business with large firms will have to adopt it too. Andy Grove’s prediction that `companies that are not Internet companies by 2005 will not be companies at all’ is beginning to look like an understatement. We are rapidly moving to an era when millions of people will have broadband connections to the Net via fixed and wireless links. If even a fraction of these newly wired users allow their machines to become P2P hosts, which means acting as servers for particular purposes, none of which need have anything to do with pirated music, the collective power of the Net will be enormously amplified, with consequences that we can barely imagine. P2P technologies could unravel the elaborate structure of search engines and portals which dominate today’s web, and turn it into a system where resources are much more dispersed and distributed. Ten years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the web and turned the world upside down. A decade from now, we may be looking back at the emergence of P2P and saying much the same. In the circumstances, the collapse of Boo.com & Co. seems a price worth paying. — Observer News Service
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| GM car sales up NEW DELHI, Jan 1 (PTI) —General Motors India (GMI) today announced a 178 per cent rise in car sales at 7,140 units in 2000 compared to 2,561 cars in the previous year, surpassing its target of 7,000 units for the year. During the year, the company sold 3,071 units of its premium mid-size car ‘Astra’, up 20 per cent, against 2,561 units in 1999, a GMI statement said. Sales of the mid-size car Corsa, which was launched in early 1999, stood at 4,609 units. GMI sold 360 units during December, a growth of 160 per cent over 135 units sold in the same month of 1999. The sales included 159 units of Astra and 201 Corsa cars. “Our performance this year has reinforced the faith of our valued customers in Opel’s brand promise. This is a clear manifestation of people’s confidence in our products, their durability, German engineering and longevity,” GMI Vice-President P. Balendran said. |
New millennium begins on optimistic note OLD-economy stocks stepped in the New Year with optimism with a noticeable rally on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) on fresh buying support from speculators as well as Indian financial institutions (FIs). However, the sensex failed to close in positive territory as select heavyweights like HLL, Infosys Technologies, Satyam Computer and Zee Telefilms suffered a setback due to selling pressure by institutional investors. Speculators also targetted select key IT scrips trying to come out of their long positions, dealers said, adding that the market had showed about Rs 270 crore net outstandings in Infosys Technologies at the beginning of the session. The high-priced Infotech, Communication and Entertainment (ICE) stocks were at the receiving end also because of the negative FII activity during the last couple of weeks. Stock brokers said activity continued to centre around traditional economy-related stocks after speculators shifted their focus towards infrastructure counters. Cement sector stocks hogged the limelight largely on speculative buying, mostly attributed to reports that leading cement manufacturers have decided to suspend sale of cement in Delhi, they said. Expectations that trend-setters Reliance Industries and Infotech giant Infosys Technologies are likely to come out with encouraging quarterly working results later this month to had some positive impact on the trading sentiments. Initially, market commenced on a strong footing on speculative activity and shares made further headway on continued buying but shares particularly in the technology segment gave up part of earlier gains on re-emergence of profit-taking by speculators. FDI inflows Foreign investors remain gung-ho over the information, communication and entertainment segment despite a heavy meltdown of ICE in the stock market, if approvals given to foreign direct investment(FDI) proposals are any indication. Even as the top of the ICE stocks — be it Infosys, Satyam, Zee and HFCL — were being pounded in the market, FDI approvals kept flowing in at a hectic pace accounting for a whopping 80 per cent of the total clearances accorded since September, 2000. Out of the total FDI approvals worth Rs 8301 crore in the last four months, a lion’s share of Rs 6875.72 crore was claimed by the proposals in the ICE areas, an analysis of the cases cleared by the Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) clearly illustrates. These numbers include the approvals given for the American Depository Receipts since officials in the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion contend that the ADRs amount certainly to FDI inflows. It was the Rs 2250-crore ADR approval to HCL Technologies which made a significant impact on the overall approvals. — Agencies |
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Atalji.com a superhit PATNA: Atal Behari Vajpayee is out to give the portals of India the shock of the year. The recently launched website on his name, ‘atalji.com’, is fast emerging as the most-hit website of India. On January 1, 2001 at around 1 pm, the Atal website had registered 109775 hits (visitors to the site) and at the same time, 240 internet users were logged on to the site simultaneously. The facts came tumbling after, as this Tribune correspondent logged onto the ‘atalji.com’ on the New Year. The ‘atalji.com happens to be elaborately designed and has all the ingredients for all ranges of questions and informations an Atal-fan might love to seek. And on top of that, you can well e-mail your letter to the Prime Minister! As the website claims, the letters will be read by the PM himself! This however, will not be free of security hassles. As one clicks the menu for ‘mail Atal’, a warning or to say a notice comes flashing —— “the message, for security and sanctity purposes, shall be scanned then sent to Atalji through the Prime Minister’s Office”. So gear up folks for an audience with the PM himself. The menu card of ‘atalji.com’ has following options —- Jannayak, Life sketch, Speech, Quotes, Achievements, Party, Team, Mail Atal Ji and Contact. The opening page of the website has pictures of Vajpayee that his fan-followers might wish to treasure. The young Atal in the pictures may not have been in the collection of his fan club. As one clicks the Quotes section it has Home minister L.K. Advani’s remarks about Vajpayee. The Speech section has Atal’s addresses and various speeches, topped by his address to the nation on May 19, 1996. In the Life sketch section, one can have information about the most popular Indian of the year that was. The Biographical sketch part mentions his father’s name as Shri Krishna Bihari Vajpayee. Many people write his name as ‘Atal Behari’ but the sketch admits his name as ‘Bihari’. His profession is mentioned as journalist and social worker. For many who do not know much about him, the news that he loves to cook, travel and read will come as a pleasant surprise. In the ‘special interests’ section international affairs, uplift of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes, and woman and child welfare are mentioned. Interestingly, the ‘biodata’ of the PM mentions his marital status as ‘unmarried’. This Padma Vibhushan’ awardee and the most popular bachelor of India is really making waves. Give the keys, keep wife! NEW YORK: An American man who tuned into a police scanner was surprised to hear traffic officers chasing his wife. The woman was arrested after her car was spotted zigzagging through streets in Milwaukee at less than 50 kmph. Her husband later showed up at the police station to claim the car keys, but refused to bail her out. The man, listening into the police radio frequency, heard that she was being charged with drink-driving, fleeing from police, driving over the central line and driving without a licence. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, when the man was asked if he wanted to bail her out, he told police: “You can keep her.” — Reuter |
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