February 26, 2001

Unknown crusader
Few people know about the Kanpur-based Virendra Jain who runs the Midas Touch Investor Association. Those who do, see him as a quixotic crusader waging a lonely war against the Canstar Mutual Fund scheme as well as ‘vanishing companies’. For many long years his battle seemed fruitless, barring minor successes like the setting up of court directed task forces to investigate vanishing companies. Just as the regulators were beginning to take him for granted, things changed. Justice Bhanwar Singh of the Allahabad High Court decided to summon SEBI chairman D R Mehta to Court and directed him to show cause why specific court directions regarding the Canstar scheme had not been carried out. Ironically, it was Mehta’s direct intervention which forced Canstar to pay much more money to investors than it has originally proposed. However, the payment of Rs 23 per unit was still lower than the promised return of Rs 26.50 assured under the scheme. The summons is probably a lesson that Court orders are never to be trifled with.

Deadly deathtrap
Every time the Indian highways claim a celebrity life, it sparks of much hand wringing and a short-lived debate on safety standards. Congress leader Rajesh Pilot’s death and that of several school children recently focussed some attention on road accidents. In Maharshtra, the demise of theatre star Bhakti Barve drew attention to the problems of reckless driving on the high-speed, international class Mumbai-Pune Expressway. But road accident statistics are chilling enough even without these high profile victims. “Deaths on Indian roads are at least six times worse than the worst of the European countries,” says G Raghuram in the India Infrastructure report 2001, and this estimate does not include the large number of unreported deaths. Britan which has the safest roads in Europe and a vehicular density of 67/km of road, has only 1.5 road deaths for every 10,000 vehicles. India, with a mere 10 vehicles/km has a hefty 20.8 deaths for every 10,000 vehicles. The number of deaths increase to 51 when calculated per billion passenger kilometres. The high level of deaths are attributed to drunken drivers, overloaded transport vehicles (both goods and passenger vehicles), poor maintenance of roads as well automobiles and gross indiscipline by drivers. The bigger tragedy is that this issue hasn’t even become important enough to develop into a campaign for road discipline and safety measures.

ANMI’s squabbles
Right until the Supreme Court verdict, stock brokers across the country, had stayed strongly united for eight long years, irrespective of their stock exchanges. No sooner did the apex court ruled against them, than their unity crumbled and squabbles broke out. At the Association of NSE Members of India (ANMI), the verdict led to nasty allegations regarding collection of legal fees, appointment of advocates and about the misutilisation of funds meant for legal expenses. The response of ANMI chairman (western region) Dhrupad Mahadevia is most poetic. Dismissing the charges as ‘arrows aimed by pencil pushers envious of the unity and focus’ of the region, he defends all ANMI actions saying: ‘The search for someone to blame is always successful. Even as the ice continues to melt in the Himalayas (pg.15, line 10 of the SC judgement), let us together stem the flow, else we shall be doomed to drift in the Indian Ocean’.
Quoting Lord Shaftesbury, he writes: ‘We are not here to play, to dream to drift; We have hard work to do and loads to lift; Shun no the struggle — fact it, is God’s Gift.’ Unfortunately, this poetic plea has yet to bring ANMI members together.

Hotshot consultants?
When ‘hot shot’ international consultants Ernst & Young were caught plagiarising the environmental impact report on a dam project for its client Murdeshwar Power Corporation, it tried to live down the embarrassment by sacking the person responsible. This person had simply copied the impact report prepared by the Institute for Catchment Studies and Environmental Management, Bangalore, for the Tattihalla Augmentation Scheme and passed it off as an assessment by Ernst & Young. The Karnataka greens used this ‘fraud’ to campaign successfully against the project and the entire controversy was reported by this paper (B S Nagraj, August 27, 2000). If Ernst & Young thought that the problem was now behind it, it is in for a nasty shock.

The Indian Express report has been reproduced in its entirety by the India Infrastructure Report 2001 (brought out by the Infrastructure Development Finance Corporation) which is set to be a definite annual document on the status of Indian infrastructure projects. Clearly, a huge price to pay for a slothful employee and careless supervision. The fact that IDFC serves as the Secretariat to the Prime Minister’s Task Force on Infrastructure can only add to the consultant’s woes.

Updated weekly.

The author's e-mail address is: suchetadalal@yahoo.com

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