A Big Promise to Keep
I have been very lazy in blogging. From today, there will be at least one post every two days. It is a promise I am sure I will live up to. Let's begin this blog's new year with two interesting reads.
- How India managed to defeat polio. (BBC)
In a vast country of more than a billion people who are culturally, economically, linguistically and socially diverse, "micro-plans" helped because they tossed up precious data about the specifics of a particular place - areas to be covered by each vaccination team on each day of the immunisation campaign, names and designations of the vaccinators, supervisors and community workers assigned to the area along with the vaccine, logistics distribution plan and so on.
- Public sectors units are no milch cows. (Business Line)
Can you imagine the promoter of a listed private sector company arm-twisting it to sell its products below cost to his favourite charity? Or asking it to buy shares in a group firm or demanding big dividends whenever he was short of cash?
You probably can’t, because this would have investors coming down on him like a tonne of bricks and regulators hauling him up for bad corporate governance. Yet, such promoter behaviour is par for the course in listed public sector companies in India.
Video: Bloomberg on why gold prices may rise 12% this year.
The second part of The Explainer: The Sri Lankan Ethnic Conflagration will appear this weekend. Read Part I.