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In a recent interview to a news agency, the market regulator- the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) Chief Mr. U.K. Sinha said that stock market returns are three-times more than gold and that a greater share of household savings has begun coming into the equity market. His gratuitous comments on the benefits of equities betray a conflict of interest on the part of the regulator. As a neutral umpire, the SEBI chief is putatively presiding over the stock market players to ensure that rules of the games are not broken and that the odious instances of insider trading to benefit by stock prices rally are thwarted. But he is not in the game of promoting equity culture as his role is purely an arbiter of the conduct of market forces—deviant or errant.

With Ranil Vickremesinghe as prime minister, president Maithripala Sirisena has become much freer now to pursue his policy of reconciliation with the ethnic Tamils. He assured a US delegation led by the Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs that he would give priority to probe the alleged war crimes and human rights violations during the last stage of the civil war against the LTTE (against Tamil civilians) through an ‘independent domestic mechanism.’ Earlier, on the sixth anniversary of the Sri Lankan army’s victory over the LTTE, he reiterated his commitment to establish the truth of what had actually happened during those days because the facts needed to be established and justice delivered.

However laudable may be Union Minister Maneka Ghandi’s bid to restrict consumption of fast food and drinks by school children, it would be a futile exercise to achieve the objective by merely banning their sale in and around schools in India. If the United States, the world’s original and largest promoter of fast food and fizzy drinks, could do little to change the eating and drinking habits of its children despite voluntary measures by some institutions to ban their campus sale, there is no reason to believe that an official dictat in India to this effect will succeed. Instead, a strong and sustained campaign against the ill effects of such consumption by children to influence the mind of parents as well as children may help.

Keeping his majoritarian assertiveness intact, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has retreated on land acquisition law, under political compulsions, in order to ensure a 'farmer-friendly' image for himself. It is a confession of his government's botched moves to promote a law with inadequate farmer safeguards, by a series of ordinances, in the face of country-wide resistance.

Situations never remain static. Politics and governance are no exceptions. The latest example is Haryana. Although ten months are too short a period to pass any judgement on the functioning of Manohar Lal Khttar-led BJP government which assumed power in October 2014, yet signs of slippages in its functioning as also in the ruling party’s politics have started becoming discernible.

The Patel community in Gujarat is powerful—both economically and politically. It is also quite affluent. One wonders why it needs reservation and shares in jobs, meant for backward sections. The ongoing agitation has brought Gujarat to a grinding halt and took a toll of ten innocent lives. The command of the agitation is in the hands of 22-year-old Hardik Patel. He says “our people don’t get jobs despite scoring 80-90 per cent marks, so they are forced to do their own business because of this reservation system. Jobs are cornered by those from reserved category”. His objective is to work to change the politics and system in the country.

Cynics are likely to count two major achievements of Narendra Modi during his first 15 months in office – the scrapping of the Planning Commission and the renaming of Aurangzeb Road after A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.

The RBI Deputy Governor Mr. H.R. Khan hit the nail on the head when he said the last few years have been trying times for the domestic banking industry with impairment of asset quality and diminishing profitability even as it is called upon to meet the mounting credit needs of the economy. His remarks at the inaugural of India’s newest Bandhan Bank Pvt Ltd in Kolkata recently that the banking space is now getting crowded with licences having been granted for two universal private banks earlier and differentiated bank license to eleven payments banks across the country on August 19 show that it is time for the banking industry to be competitive and serve the economy in an efficient manner by pricing risks responsibly and judiciously. This is so as the emerging milieu has the great potential to bring a sea-change in the commercial banking scenario in the country with the man in the street getting access to banking services with no cost or hidden add-on charges.

Pakistan backing out from the process that would have led to a composite dialogue with India is disappointing and unfortunate for South Asia. Resumption of a composite dialogue would have been in the best interests for peace and development in the region. The two leaders – Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Prime Minister Narendra Modi – reached an accord in Ufa in Russia in July bearing the “collective responsibility to ensure peace and promote development” in the region. To this end both the leaders condemned terrorism in all its forms and agreed to cooperate with each other to eliminate this menace from South Asia.

LONDON: While the western mainstream media has described the present market crash as “this is all China’s fault” – despite the fact that the real break happened after the FOMC Minutes last week – the Chinese Xinhua said that the China central bank Tuesday blamed wide-spread expectations of a Fed rate hike in September for the global market rout. Yao Yudong, head of the People’s Bank of China’s Research Institute of Finance, said the expected Fed rate hike next month had been the “trigger” for the wild market swings. He also cautioned that the Fed rate hike could accelerate the plunge of U.S. stocks and trigger a sell-off of assets worldwide and even a new global credit crisis. Obviously there is an imperative need for the Fed to remain patient before the U.S. inflation reaches 2 percent.