Here are the real Nobel Prize winners

You would think that the Nobel Prize has been given to Osama instead of Obama; such has been the ballyhoo and brouhaha generated over the act of edifying the first Black President of a country that historically treated blacks as slaves and chattel to be traded in the American version of Mandis. But then, surely Obama deserves it more than the now deceased former Prime Minister of Israel Menachem Begin who was once designated a “terrorist” by the British! And much more than another deceased soul (may his soul rest in peace) named Cordell Hull who – as American Secretary of State – refused exile to God knows how many Jews who wanted to escape from Nazi Germany. All of them subsequently died in concentration camps.

But for whatever it is worth, here is the Business & Economy list of Nobel Prize nominations for next year across categories:

peace: This was a very, very close contest. In one corner stood two brothers who have completely redefined the concept of brotherly love. In the other corner stood a ‘brother’ who has completely redefined the very concept of ‘neighbourly’ love. In one corner stood Mukesh & Anil Ambani and in the other corner stood the Chief of Lashkar-e-Taiba Hafiz Saeed. Ultimately, it was clinched by Saeed for his actual demonstration of ‘peace’ and ‘love’ during 26/11

economic sciences: Yes, the prize is not for ‘economics’ but ‘economic sciences’ since virtually all economists across the world have been mesmerised by the delusion that the study of quirky human behaviour is an exact science. There were many contestants for this prized prize – most belonging to the political and corporate class who understand ‘money’ like no one else. After much deliberation, debate, wrangling and mud slinging, the nomination was conferred upon the honourable Sharad Pawar for taking economics even beyond the frontiers of science. How else can you explain an inflation rate of zero percent and less when the prices of sugar, oil and vegetables have soared by more than 100%?

literature: If you believe that great literature transcends wretched reality in a sublime manner that borders on fantasy, then this one is a no brainer. The unanimous verdict was The Draft Direct Tax Code that has been circulated for debate and discussion. This masterpiece contains a sparkling gem that says that the market value of the plum houses that bureaucrats occupy in VIP Delhi will be added to their taxable income. Now if that does not border on fantasy, I don’t know what will.

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.

2012 : DNA National B-School Survey 2012
Ranked 1st in International Exposure (ahead of all the IIMs)
Ranked 6th Overall
Zee Business Best B-School Survey 2012
Prof. Arindam Chaudhuri’s Session at IMA Indore
IIPM IN FINANCIAL TIMES, UK. FEATURE OF THE WEEK
IIPM strong hold on Placement : 10000 Students Placed in last 5 year
IIPM’s Management Consulting Arm-Planman Consulting
Professor Arindam Chaudhuri – A Man For The Society….
IIPM: Indian Institute of Planning and Management
IIPM makes business education truly global
Management Guru Arindam Chaudhuri
Rajita Chaudhuri-The New Age Woman
IIPM B-School Facebook Page
IIPM Global Exposure
IIPM Best B School India
IIPM B-School Detail
IIPM Links
IIPM : The B-School with a Human Face
IIPM – FLP (Flexi Learning Program)

The Blue Bull goes on the rampage in the fields of Uttar Pradesh

As the Blue Bull goes on the rampage in the fields of Uttar Pradesh, the state government wants a return to the days of bounty hunting

The current law on hunting in India states that anyone can kill a Nilgai if – a) He or she has a valid licensed gun b) Has the requisite permission from the government, and c) Hands over the carcass to the forest department. However, indiscriminate hunting of the as-of-now healthy numbers of Nilgai seems like a bad idea. In the absence of a proper machinery to monitor their numbers, such a move is likely to drastically bring their numbers.

A similar story is unfolding 13,554 kms away in the US state of Idaho. The mostly mountainous state is home to the Gray Wolf, where hunting the animal is set to begin. Hunters are bracing for a field day with loaded guns to go after the once-endangered animal and it is believed that the move could leave the state with as many as 220 wolves dead. Ironically, Idaho’s state motto is Esto Perpetua, which in Latin translates as “Let it be forever”.

Coming back to the Nilgai ‘menace’, Belinda Wright, a well known conservationist says, “Sympathy towards the farmers is understandable, for the loss of crops is a loss to their livelihood. If hunting of one species is allowed, it could open up the possibility of hunting other species in the future. It’s best not to touch hunting laws at this point. Instead, other options should be considered to address the issues of the farmers.

Perhaps it is one of those situations where it is difficult to make a choice in favour of either man or beast, but certainly there is need, now more than ever, to look for a more meaningful alternative like the one being worked out where castrating the male bull could at least curtail the problem… for in allowing hunting we are only curing the symptoms and not the disease...

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.

2012 : DNA National B-School Survey 2012
Ranked 1st in International Exposure (ahead of all the IIMs)
Ranked 6th Overall
Zee Business Best B-School Survey 2012
Prof. Arindam Chaudhuri’s Session at IMA Indore
IIPM IN FINANCIAL TIMES, UK. FEATURE OF THE WEEK
IIPM strong hold on Placement : 10000 Students Placed in last 5 year
IIPM’s Management Consulting Arm-Planman Consulting
Professor Arindam Chaudhuri – A Man For The Society….
IIPM: Indian Institute of Planning and Management
IIPM makes business education truly global
Management Guru Arindam Chaudhuri
Rajita Chaudhuri-The New Age Woman
IIPM B-School Facebook Page
IIPM Global Exposure
IIPM Best B School India
IIPM B-School Detail
IIPM Links
IIPM : The B-School with a Human Face
IIPM – FLP (Flexi Learning Program)

INFLATION: FOODGRAINS

For the middle class families, rising food prices have proved to be killing and the steps by government are a big joke, say Vikas Kumar and Niharika Patra

Those are not just the normal day to day food items that are wreaking havoc on middle-class family budgets. Thanks to the largesse doled out by the Sixth Pay Commission, the amount of money they have to pay as school fees for their children has virtually doubled – often with retrospective effect. And unlike their luckier ‘government employee’ counterparts, an overwhelming majority of those working in the private sector have not seen a pay hike for more than a year. Says Rajarshi, “I have two sons and their school fees have now doubled. I don’t know how will I pay all this.” Rajarshi and her husband really don’t know how to tackle this situation. So, middle-class Indians like Sadhna and Rajarshi who used to save about Rs.5,000 per month have now seen their savings dwindle to literally nothing.

There is more bad news for them in store with the monsoon being far from normal. Says JP Malik, Department of Economic Analysis and Policy at RBI, “It is simple economics. The problem is because of the supply-demand gap which has happened because of the trouble in monsoons. Pulses and cereals have suffered more because they are more dependent on monsoon water”. But poor monsoons alone cannot be blamed for the incredible rise in prices. There is something rotten in the supply chain related to food products in the country. The farmer in the village still gets less than Rs.10 for every kg of cauliflower that he can harvest and sell. By the time you buy it from the market, it costs at least Rs.80 per kg. This is a clear sign that the trader and the middleman are making hay while the farmer as well as the consumer suffer. Add to that the complete absence of modern cold storages in rural areas despite many pious announcements from myriad policy makers.

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.

2012 : DNA National B-School Survey 2012
Ranked 1st in International Exposure (ahead of all the IIMs)
Ranked 6th Overall
Zee Business Best B-School Survey 2012
Prof. Arindam Chaudhuri’s Session at IMA Indore
IIPM IN FINANCIAL TIMES, UK. FEATURE OF THE WEEK
IIPM strong hold on Placement : 10000 Students Placed in last 5 year
IIPM’s Management Consulting Arm-Planman Consulting
Professor Arindam Chaudhuri – A Man For The Society….
IIPM: Indian Institute of Planning and Management
IIPM makes business education truly global
Management Guru Arindam Chaudhuri
Rajita Chaudhuri-The New Age Woman
IIPM B-School Facebook Page
IIPM Global Exposure
IIPM Best B School India
IIPM B-School Detail
IIPM Links
IIPM : The B-School with a Human Face
IIPM – FLP (Flexi Learning Program)

O.M.G! G.S.T

for people like us

In the Book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible, Saint Joseph says, “But when the crop comes in, give a fifth of it to Pharaoh. The other four-fifths you may keep as seed for the fields and as food for yourselves and your households and your children.” While the Pharaohs have given way to the Government (that’s easy), the ‘one-fifth’ has become a ‘one-third’ (almost)! But interestingly, what St. Joseph says is equally relevant in the context of indirect taxes as well – paying a part of the produced goods to the governing authority in one’s state.

This entails the development of a comprehensive IT network for real time recording, sharing, and dissemination of information for calculating taxes later on. One look at the current Tax Information Exchange System (TINXSYS) will be enough to tell even an inadvertent viewer that the system is purely inefficient in handling all these functionalities; for that matter, it is not even present in all the states. Can the presence of multiple check posts within a few kilometres on either side of the border for two bordering states help? Any frequent interstate highway traveller would tell you how even a state entry tax collection booth causes huge delays; implementation of the GST through such check posts will further aggravate the problem as the states will probe even more into the goods passing their borders in order to minimise tax arbitrage. And we’ve not even come to the other informal ‘tax’ that border post guards collect.

But to its credit, the gargantuan challenge that the proposed tax aims to tackle is to minimise the problem of tax cascading, which has by far been the biggest cause of tax evasion and has been the reason that small unorganised players have spawned uncontrolled within the Indian market, as these are largely outside the threshold level of tax – due to both real income and unreported income – under the current regime.

Tax cascading can be understood by a simple example. Imagine a producer buying raw materials from a vendor for Rs.1,000 including Rs.100 as tax at a 10% rate to the vendor. Now, when the producer sells the final product to the end consumer for Rs.2,000, the tax at the same rate of 10% in the current VAT system comes out to be Rs.200. The customer should pay only Rs.100 as Rs.100 has already been paid on the raw materials before the value addition took place. But the customer pays Rs.200 as the producer does not get any input credit on the tax already paid. Hence, in essence, the end customer ends up paying a “tax on tax”. This leads to non-accounting of transactions, especially in sectors like construction and housing, leading to massive revenue losses and a direct incentive for the parallel economy.

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.

2012 : DNA National B-School Survey 2012
Ranked 1st in International Exposure (ahead of all the IIMs)
Ranked 6th Overall
Zee Business Best B-School Survey 2012
Prof. Arindam Chaudhuri’s Session at IMA Indore
IIPM IN FINANCIAL TIMES, UK. FEATURE OF THE WEEK
IIPM strong hold on Placement : 10000 Students Placed in last 5 year
IIPM’s Management Consulting Arm-Planman Consulting
Professor Arindam Chaudhuri – A Man For The Society….
IIPM: Indian Institute of Planning and Management
IIPM makes business education truly global
Management Guru Arindam Chaudhuri
Rajita Chaudhuri-The New Age Woman
IIPM B-School Facebook Page
IIPM Global Exposure
IIPM Best B School India
IIPM B-School Detail
IIPM Links
IIPM : The B-School with a Human Face
IIPM – FLP (Flexi Learning Program) 

 

“We started with fewer products”

B&E: You have the highest retail presence and often in the same market you have more than one store. Doesn’t it end up in cannibalizing the sales of your products?

SS: No, I don’t think so, we have huge portfolio to offer and we design two stores in the same locality in different ways. Say for instance, in one store the first floor has lifestyle products and second floor, sports goods. In the second store, the first floor has women’s apparel and the second floor, men’s; It might sound very simplistic, but this is indeed the strategy that helped us to run our stores in same locality, phenomenally.

B&E: What understanding of the Indian market did you have when you entered and what strategies did you adopt at the initial stage?

AJ: When we entered, we saw that the sports market in India, unlike any other country was largely male dominated and so we thought that it’s not suggestible to launch our entire portfolio. We launched only those products which pertained to the choice of the male customer and we also kept our offerings limited only to cricket and athletics.

B&E: Tell us more about your future plans in the Indian market?

AJ: We have entered the kids apparel segment and we would be entering into several other segments also, but not compromising with the brand equity of Reebok. Our vision is to establish Reebok as a most loved fashion and sports brand in India and we would be offering whatever a consumer requires to dress up for all possible occasions.

Read more......

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri

and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.

2012 : DNA National B-School Survey 2012
Ranked 1st in International Exposure (ahead of all the IIMs)
Ranked 6th Overall
Zee Business Best B-School Survey 2012
Prof. Arindam Chaudhuri’s Session at IMA Indore
IIPM IN FINANCIAL TIMES, UK. FEATURE OF THE WEEK
IIPM strong hold on Placement : 10000 Students Placed in last 5 year
IIPM’s Management Consulting Arm-Planman Consulting
Professor Arindam Chaudhuri – A Man For The Society….
IIPM: Indian Institute of Planning and Management
IIPM makes business education truly global
Management Guru Arindam Chaudhuri
Rajita Chaudhuri-The New Age Woman
IIPM B-School Facebook Page
IIPM Global Exposure
IIPM Best B School India
IIPM B-School Detail
IIPM Links
IIPM : The B-School with a Human Face
IIPM – FLP (Flexi Learning Program)