This rests on the assumption that retailers will keep prices in check. But I’m not sure whether there’s need to bring in another regulator here, yet. The biggest and the most effective regulator of all — the market — will take care of prices. Consumers are pretty smart and can and do move with the malls. If it is low prices they seek, it is low prices they’ll get. Look out of your window and you’ll see this movement as one mall after another tries to first get the footfalls and then convert those footfalls into revenues.

But the closure of organised retail, citing law and order as the reason, has one implication that goes beyond business and politics. It is an axe that cuts the very roots of what governance stands for - the provision of law and order so that legal civil activity can proceed; business as usual, so to speak. If the Mayawati administration can’t guarantee this basic governance, it has no business governing. This is indeed the most fundamental of all governance expectations that citizens expect from any government, anywhere across the world. Uttar Pradesh included.

The underreported story of the week: smart investors

If there were an award for underplaying a story, this week’s honour would go to the underreporting of the restructuring of household savings. In a line: the financial assets of households, at 11.7 per cent in 2005-06 are higher than those in physical assets (10.7 per cent). This (latest data available in the Reserve Bank of India’s recent annual report released last week), breaks a five year trend, beginning 2000-01, when the last bull market crashed in February 2000, following the dot-com aftermath. In these five years, 2002-03 were the years with the highest difference between financial and physical assets, with households choosing property and gold over stocks and funds that added to a difference of 2 percentage points or over Rs 50,000 crore.

... contd.