Below the line . Don’t mess with Gadkari

The grapevine is that Union Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari gave media baron Subhash Chandra the cold shoulder recently. It appears that several Central road projects awarded to Chandra’s Essel Infraprojects were executed shoddily.

When Chandra went to meet Gadkari to resolve the issue, the Minister not only made him wait for an hour-and-a-half outside his office, but also warned of confiscating Essel Infraprojects’ bank guarantee money, if it did not mend its ways. Gadkari apparently has given a three-month notice to Essel to implement road projects to the satisfaction of his department or face action.

Corporate India will certainly be beholden to the RBI and the government for the latest External Commercial Borrowing (ECB) framework. The reason is not far to see. The ECB end-use restrictions in real-estate activities have been eased. Now ECBs can be raised and deployed in construction and development of industrial parks/integrated township/SEZ, purchase and long-term leasing of industrial land as part of a new project and any activity falling under infrastructure.

It’s interesting to see how this change came about. The words “real estate activities” have now been defined under the new ECB framework and these activities have been excluded from the scope of real estate!

Now why didn’t the government think of this masterstroke some years back? It could have given a boost to our GDP growth.

Anubha Shrivastava, District Magistrate of Shahdol district in Madhya Pradesh, must be ruing her decision of sending that message from her WhatsApp account. Just before the Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections, Shrivastava in a WhatsApp chat — which has now gone viral on social media — asked her deputy Pooja Tiwari to make sure the BJP won the Jaitpur Assembly seat if she wanted a promotion. Though the BJP’s Manisha Singh won in Jaitpur, the Congress managed to wrest power from the BJP in the State. Now, the Congress is pushing not only for a repoll in the Jaitpur Assembly constituency, but for action against the District Magistrate. An FIR has also been filed against Shrivastava.

With more Indians getting hooked on to social media, cyber-security has become a challenge. The Home Affairs Ministry is urging people to follow its recently-launched twitter handle — @cyberdost, to increase awareness regarding cyber-crime and cyber-security.

The Ministry has begun sending text messages besides using the digital medium to make more consumers aware of its handle. From how to handle spam emails to protecting bank details, the Twitter handle focuses on imparting information on various issues. It also advises consumers on how and whom to report to on instances of cybercrime.

After shaking the country’s telecom sector, it seems Mukesh Ambani is looking at e-commerce, which has the small players worried. Praveen Khandelwal, Secretary General, Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT), said, “We have learnt from media reports that Mukesh Ambani will soon enter e-commerce market...but, whosoever launches any e-commerce portal it should be based on fair fundamentals and not on malpractices which included predatory pricing, deep discounting, loss funding or exclusivity. We have seen in the past that big corporate houses are more interested in generating profits rather than serving as a strong conduit of supply chain.

“While, everyone is free to chose their line of business,the genuine interests of the small traders need to be protected from the onslaught of big corporate houses and MNCs.”