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Wednesday,
June 20, 2001, Chandigarh, India  
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Reliance
rated high by Business Week No room
for non-trade issues in WTO: Maran
Indians
hacked UAE Web site |
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Action
against CSE officials likely Windows
XP— a hacker's dream Take up
trade issue with Pak, say exporters UTI
redemptions at 2,302 cr in May Punjab
to give 185 cr subsidy to SSIs Validity
of Form ST-38 extended Allahabad
Bank net dips
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Reliance rated high by Business Week
New York, June 19 In its latest Asia edition, the magazine has eulogised the Ambanis for their meteoric rise saying no body has built a major company in India as quickly as this family. In less than forty years, Reliance has grown so big that its production of petroleum products and petrochemicals accounts for 3 per cent of India’s gross domestic product, the magazine said in its cover story. Stating that its ability to raise money was legendary, the magazine noted that the group was consistently profitable and earned $ 900 million on a revenue of $ 12.9 billion last year, up 10 per cent from the previous year. The Reliance Industries promoted by Dhirubhai Ambani, says Business Week, have come in for severe criticism for their close ties with officialdom which rankle rivals, though there is a long tradition of such relationships in India. Time and again over the years, successive Indian governments have altered regulations in industries that Reliance subsequently dominated. It refers to recent change in telecom policy which, it says, was reversed after industry executives figured it out that Reliance would be its biggest beneficiary, Business Week said. But Reliance, according to the magazine, denied that it exerted improper pressure on regulators and insisted the rule change was meant to benefit the entire telecom sector and consumers. It vows to forge anyway with its plans to offer cheap mobile services. Having achieved world-class operations, the Ambanis would like, for instance, to offer Reliance shares on the New York Stock Exchange. They want the name Reliance to rank up there with DuPont or Royal Dutch-ShellGroup. If Reliance reached such an exalted level, the Ambanis’ success, in a way, will be India’s. It will prove that the nation’s economy is sufficiently mature to produce best-in-class manufacturers, it stressed. But Reliance, the magazine pointed out, operates in a transitional India, where tariffs as high as 41 per cent still protect some of its operations and tax breaks go straight to the bottomline. Many of its rivals are inefficient state companies. And unlike Korean or Japanese conglomerates, Reliance has never pursued a global strategy. Its main market is its home market. As policymakers wrestle with the thorny problem of loosening state protections, Reliance faces a huge test with its foray into telecom. Assuming the government doesn’t reverse itself again, the magazine says, Reliance will have to compete on equal terms in a notoriously ferocious industry with such globally competitive players as AT&T, Hutchison Whampoa and Singapore Telecommunication, as well as aggressive Indian companies such as Bharti Telecom and BPL. It’s a high-stakes business, it quotes Varun Bery, Managing Director of Hong Kong-based private equity fund Telecom Venture Group, as saying, Reliance has yet to demonstrate an adequate track record in businesses with a consumer interface.
PTI
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No room for non-trade issues in WTO: Maran New Delhi, June 19 In a letter to Trade Ministers of Group of 77 (G-77) countries, Commerce Minister Murasoli Maran said “mandated negotiations and reviews and various working group discussions form a large agenda for the WTO system, which stands unfinished”. Noting with concern that significant non-trade issues were being promised in the name of trade liberalisation and constituency interests of the developing countries, Mr Maran underlined that developing countries are reluctant for inclusion of new ideas. “We should use Doha to take stock of the situation on these issues plus the implementation concerns. Bringing multiple issues on the table just to get substantial trade-offs and swap concessions advantageous for a few countries without any benefit to the developing countries does not augur well for the success of the multilateral trading system”, he said in the letter. The developing countries need to coordinate their positions on various WTO-related subjects as “ full stakeholders” in the multilateral trading system based on their strong commonality of interests on major issues and urged the G-77 countries to evolve a common position and strategy for the fourth WTO Ministerial Conference scheduled to be held at Doha in November, 2001. Regretting that despite the May, 2000 decision of the WTO General Council that implementation issues should be resolved before the conference, many developing countries were openly stating that these implementation issues could only be resolved as part of a new round of negotiations. Outlining the priorities, Mr Maran said the WTO work should concentrate on the full implementation of the Uruguay round results and “ built-in agenda” which foresaw new negotiations and agriculture and services. “The reluctance to take account of the crisis on patents and drugs prices in the WTO and lack of interest and attendance by developed countries of a WTO initiative on technology transfer to developing countries”, he said.
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Indians hacked UAE Web site
Dubai, June 19 "The hackers, believed to be from India, could only damage the front page of the site, as we acted quickly to shut it down," an official of the department was quoted as saying. The hackers identified themselves as "Hindustan Hackers," he said. The official said, "We have not located the hackers. But we are trying to find out from where the site was hacked. We are not sure whether the site was really hacked from a computer in India." This is the fourth time in recent months that the site has been hacked. "First it was hacked from Israel, then from Kuwait and Russia, and now, probably, from India," he told the paper. "A whole new setup with upgraded firewall and more security will be installed for the public service," he said. "The hackings are occurring due partly to a weak firewall. Any animal, a dog or a cat, can enter your house if the door is weak or there is no door at all," he said.
IANS
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Action against CSE officials likely Kolkata, June 19 A senior Mumbai-based SEBI official said that the market watchdog was currently examining the report submitted to it by a team of officials sent to enquire into the reasons which led to the payment crisis The official said the report contained remarks about the functioning of the Surveillance Department of the Exchange. When specifically asked whether SEBI would initiate corrective measures to prop up the exchange to shore up its dipping trade volumes, the official evaded a direct reply. He said taking necessary action was a logical sequence. The March payments crisis, which threw the exchange into a tizzy, had a serious fallout on stock markets nationwide. The CSE faced a severe financial problem to meet the payment settlements as the Settlement Guarantee Fund was almost wiped out forcing the member brokers of the Board of the Exchange to resign. The CSE authorities have already initiated action against a number of member-brokers responsible for the crisis declaring them defaulters and moving High Court to attach their properties for recovery of dues. The Surveillance Department of the Exchange came under severe criticism from member brokers who alleged that CSE authorities were granting preferential treatment to certain people by not switching off their terminals when they had failed to meet payment obligations and margin dues. The head of the surveillance, however, had written to the CSE authorities even before the crisis that Market Operations Department was not passing on relevant information to it for which terminals could not be switched off in case of defaulting brokers. The Surveillance head alleged that a separate margin section had been created which was not reporting to it. In such a case, any information relating to margin collections from brokers were conveyed to the ED, which was subsequently not passed on to the surveillance cell for taking necessary corrective action. Some brokers also alleged that calculation of gross margin was not proper as per SEBI guidelines, and this had led to lower margin money realisation by the exchange.
PTI
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Windows
XP— a hacker's
dream London, June 19 The company's publicists are softening up Wall Street and the media with soothing noises about the wonderful benefits the new operating system will confer upon humanity. Among these benefits are richer communications facilities, better facilities for mobile users, creating, organising and sharing digital photos and video, integrating the handling of downloaded music into the operating system, and making it easier for home users to share one Internet link between different computers. There are, however, two "features" in Windows XP about which Mr Gates and his colleagues are less forthcoming. The first is something with the innocuous title of "Internet Explorer Smart Tags". This was not a feature of the widely-distributed second Beta (test) version of XP; it has surfaced in later test versions. What Smart Tags does is to allow Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser — which of course is included in Windows XP — to turn any word on any web page into a link to a website approved by Microsoft. Or, to put it simply, Smart Tags enables Microsoft — through the browser running on your PC — to re-edit anybody's site, without the owner's knowledge or permission, in a way that tempts users to leave and go to a site chosen by Microsoft. It works like this. You click on a link to something I've written — let's say an article I wrote about how the British Government handed over the design of its key website to Microsoft engineers, who then arranged that only users running Microsoft software can enter its authentication area. But under some words and phrases there appears a curious, purple squiggly line — analogous to the one by which Microsoft Word indicates a suspected spelling mistake. Each underlined word has suddenly become a link determined by Microsoft. None of the links were intended by me, and there is nothing that either I or The Observer can do about them. The other under-discussed feature of XP is the way in which its architecture opens up a terrifying security hole which could make it much easier for malicious programmers to launch the Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks which brought down many large e-commerce sites recently. The anatomy of a DDOS attack is simple and relies on the fact that the designers of the Internet built into it a facility for sending test signals (Pings) from one machine to another. First, the perpetrator finds a number of unprotected machines with persistent connections to the Internet and secretly installs on them a small Trojan-horse programme which can be remotely activated. At a pre-arranged moment, these Trojans are triggered to launch millions of Ping requests at the target site, which is duly overwhelmed by trying to respond to them. Up to now, DDOS attacks launched from Windows 95 and 98 machines have been relatively easy to detect and block because their operating systems do not allow application programs "raw" access to the Internet — they communicate only with the network control layer. But according to Steve Gibson, a security expert who has done some research into DDOS attacks, Windows XP changes all that, because its architecture gives the operating system raw access to the Net. The huge number of unsecured, permanently-connected Windows XP machines will, he says, "become the most sought-after target for penetration". Gibson sees XP as "the enabling factor for the creation of a series of 'Ultimate Weapons' against which the fundamentally trusting architecture of the global Internet currently has no effective defence. Windows XP is the malicious hacker's dream come true". Some feature,
huh? By arrangement with The Observer |
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Take up trade issue with Pak, say exporters Chandigarh, June 19 In a memorandum submitted to the Prime Minister’s office, the Chairman of the association, Dr N.C. Jain, said there was a vast scope of exporting goods like bicycles, scientific instruments, copper utensils, shoes, handicrafts, agricultural implements and hand tools from India to Pakistan. At present Pakistan was importing these goods from other countries where the prices were much higher than those prevalent in India. Moreover, since there was a rail link between the two countries, the transportation would be fast and less expensive.
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UTI redemptions at 2,302 cr
in May Mumbai, June 19 UTI did not raise funds through any new scheme and value of assets under India’s largest fund management stood at Rs 57,684 crore in the second month of fiscal 2001-02, AMFI said. Meanwhile, the collections of Indian mutual fund industry in May stood at Rs 7,937 crore (Rs 6,429 crore in May 2000) while the total redemptions were Rs 6,713 (Rs 5,511 crore). All the collections were through sale of units of existing scheme and MFs did not float any new scheme in the reporting month. The value of total asset under management of mutual funds stood at Rs 96,795 crore (Rs 1,04,032 crore), AMFI said. Asset management companies with predominant foreign ownership raised Rs 3,289 crore in the second month of FY-02 while their redemptions stood at Rs 1,866 crore.
PTI
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Punjab to give 185 cr subsidy to SSIs Chandigarh, June 19 Prof Jagir Singh Bhullar, Chief Parliamentary Secretary (Industries), said the government has also decided to set up a small scale industries board to improve liaison between the SSIs and the government. Besides formulating policies regarding the SSIs, the proposed board would help settle intra-departmental matters, he added. The government has also decided to arrange tours for the entrepreneurs’ to developed countries. Prof Bhullar said two cells — small scale industries and World Trade Organisation — have been set up in the Industries Department. Similarly, a technical bank had also been set up to provide technical information to the SSIs. He also advocated the need for uniformity in law regarding the SSIs. The state government has proposed to the Central Government that loans up to Rs 10 lakh by banks or other financial institutions to the SSIs should be advanced without furnishing collateral securities. Similarly the state government has recommended to the Centre to set up a Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction so that sick SSIs could be rehabilitated. |
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Validity of Form ST-38
extended Chandigarh, June 19 A spokesman said the validity of existing challans in form ST 38 (inward) had also been extended till December 31. He clarified that the forms issued to dealers would remain valid for transaction carried on or before the respective dates, notwithstanding the date of validity printed on such forms was March 31.
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Allahabad Bank net dips Kolkata, June 19 “Our business volume was Rs 26,525 crore and the decline in net profit was due to higher provisioning of Rs 226.09 crore for VRS, pension and gratuity liabilities of employees and also increase in provisioning on advances and investments against Rs 183.18 crore in the previous fiscal,” Chairman and Managing Director B Samal told reporters here. The bank has reclassified the pension and gratuity liabilities as charges to expenses as against the provisioning in the last year, otherwise operating profit would have been over Rs 330 crore as against Rs 266 crore arrived at during the current fiscal, he said.
PTI
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Hinduja TMT net zooms 119 pc BASF net rises 12.26 pc Bharat Hotels to pay 15 pc dividend IBP to divest stake in Balmer Lawrie JK Ind net profit falls |
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Gates donates $ 100 m to fight AIDS Infosys signs pact with railway firm PSC opens office in Delhi Irish Ispat shut down Ericsson plans Bluetooth services |
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Medisoft RBI’s caution Bacardi Blast 5 Turning Point RNIS centre Kangra bank Customers meet |
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