With economy plummeting Planning Commission enhances its peeing ambiance

New Delhi: The Planning Commission has issued a statement in an attempt to explain why it spent 35 lakh rupees on renovating two toilets in its office.
Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the Deputy Chairman of the Commission, avoided questions on Wednesday morning about the controversy. The expenditure was revealed by a Right to Information application filed by activist Subhash Agarwal who points out, "Cost of installation of Door Access Control System is Rs. 5,19,426 for two toilets. Cost of renovation of two toilets where door access control system is installed is Rs. 30,00,305."
Social activist Nikhil Dey links that controversial statement to the swanky toilet plan. "There is almost everything that is wrong with what was done and with the justification for it. The Planning Commission represents planning for whom, the poor of the country. And there has been a dispute with their figures because there has been a perception with everyone that within the planning commission they have one standard for the poor and another for the rich. They were placing smart cards for entry into those toilets. That privatizes, reduces the number of those who can use it...it's a huge amount of money and it's that same planning commission that not only decides what the poverty line is but also decides on how much money can be spent on a toilet across the country," he says.
Apart from the poverty line estimates issue, Mr Ahluwalia was also criticized recently after a newspaper reported, based on an RTI reply, that Rs. 2.02 lakh a day was spent by him on foreign travel between May and October, 2011. Another report said that he undertook 42 official trips (between June 2004-January 2011) of 274 days at a cost of Rs. 2.34 crore.
Planning Commission renovates its Rest Rooms for Rs 35 lakhs
Comment: What an irony? An American Bill Gates trying to build cheap toilets for Indian masses and sample Planning Commission's wasteful expenditure of Rs 35 lakhs on one single toilet...
Reinventing a toilet that has an operational cost of $0.05 per user, per day, that does not rely on water to flush waste and does not discharge pollutants is Bill Gates' latest mission. "One of my ultimate dreams now is to reinvent the toilet - find a cheaper alternative to the flush toilet that does not require running water, has smell characteristics better than the flush toilet and is cheap."
Reinventing the toilet is Bill Gates's new mission: click here

Political paralysis has stymied domestic overhauls

Big danger from a declining rupee for India
Deccan Herald Friday 25 May 2012
Swati Bhat, The New York Times
The prevailing situation is indeed grim as the country is grappling with internal and external economic threats
India may face its worst financial crisis in decades if it fails to stem a slide in the rupee, leaving the central bank with a difficult choice over how to make the best use of its limited reserves to maintain the confidence of foreign investors.
Unlike most of its Asian peers, India routinely runs large current account and fiscal deficits. That means it must attract sufficient foreign money, namely dollars, to close the gap, and a weaker home currency makes that costlier. What makes the current situation so worrisome is that India is grappling with big internal and external economic threats simultaneously: Growth is slowing. Inflation remains high. Political paralysis has stymied domestic overhauls.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the last line of defense against a currency meltdown, has cautiously begun to support the rupee, but its firepower may be more limited than its $300 billion in reserves would suggest. Beyond India’s borders, Europe is the biggest worry. As its banks deleverage, investment money has flooded out of Indian markets. If European debt troubles worsen, India could be hit with a balance of payments crisis as severe as the one that forced a sharp devaluation in 1991.
The rupee, which has dropped 16 per cent in the past four months, got a reprieve last week after six of the world’s big central banks banded together to try to ease dollar funding strains, helping it break a four-week losing trend. But analysts widely expect the rupee to resume its slide.
“The Indian currency will be the first casualty of a deterioration in the euro zone crisis,” said Mumbai-based the Bank of Baroda chief economist Rupa Rege Nitsure. If the European crisis deepens, the Indian trade deficit would widen even more rapidly, and India would have even more trouble attracting foreign capital.
“Risk appetite will obviously collapse, and gradually the currency crisis is likely to take the shape of a balance of payments crisis,” Nitsure said. India’s current account deficit swelled to $14.1 billion in its fiscal first quarter, nearly triple the tally of the previous quarter. The full-year gap is expected to be around $54 billion.
Its fiscal deficit hit $58.7 billion in the April-to-October period. In February, the government projected a deficit equal to 4.6 per cent of gross domestic product for the fiscal year ending in March 2012, although the finance minister said Friday that it would be difficult to hit that target. India relies heavily on portfolio inflows, which are foreign purchases of shares and bonds, as a means of covering its current account gap. Those flows are fickle.
Foreign portfolio investors have sold a net $50 million worth of equities so far in 2011, in sharp contrast to the $29 billion they invested in 2010, data from the Securities and Exchange Board of India’s (Sebi) website shows. In November alone, foreign funds pulled $661 million out of Indian stocks.
“The Indian economy is one of the most vulnerable to liquidity shocks in the region, not helped the least by deficits in its key balances,” said Singapore-based Forecast PTE economist Radhika Rao. The drop in portfolio inflows and the hefty current account and fiscal deficits have been the main factors behind the rupee’s decline.
The RBI appears to have intervened to try to slow the decline. Between October 28 and November 25, reserves dropped by $16 billion to $304 billion, yet the rupee still fell by 7 per cent during that period. Trading in rupee offshore forward contracts shows traders are betting on the rupee’s declining a further 1.7 per cent over the next three months and 4.5 per cent over a year. Many economists argue that the RBI has been too timid and deserves part of the blame for the rupee’s weakness.
“The biggest mistake RBI has made is that it has almost given an open invitation to speculators to short the rupee,” said Singapore-based CLSA economist Rajeev Malik. “It is really bizarre for any central bank to openly keep on saying that it will not intervene when there is already pressure on the currency to weaken and globally things are so uncertain.”
Normally, higher interest rates bolster currencies, so the rupee’s weakness is all the more significant. If the RBI decides to step in more aggressively, its maneuvering room is more limited than its reserves tally would suggest. After covering the current account deficit, short-term debt and foreign investment flows, there would be less than $20 billion left over.
Mumbai-based IndusInd Bank head (Market and Economic Research) J Moses Harding said that the Reserve Bank’s immediate concern would be stopping the spread of currency woes into the money market. The Indian banking system already borrows more than $19 billion from the central bank to meet reserve requirements, so if the RBI moved to prop up the rupee, it would drain more liquidity out of an already tight market.
Big danger from a declining rupee for India

The Unique Identification Authority of India

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has been created as an attached office under the Planning Commission. Its role is to develop and implement the necessary institutional, technical and legal infrastructure to issue unique identity numbers to Indian residents.

On June 25th 2009, the Cabinet also created and approved the position of the Chairperson of the UIDAI, and appointed Mr. Nandan Nilekani as the first Chairperson in the rank and status of a Cabinet Minister. Mr. Ram Sewak Sharma has been appointed the Director General.

The Mission
The role that the Authority envisions is to issue a unique identification number (UID) that can be verified and authenticated in an online, cost-effective manner, and that is robust enough to eliminate duplicate and fake identities.

The Timelines
The first UID numbers will be issued over the next 12-18 months counted from August 2009. The first number would be issued between August 2010 to February 2011. Over five years, the Authority plans to issue 600 million UIDs. The numbers will be issued through various ‘registrar’ agencies across the country.
The Unique Identification Authority of India
Aadhaar Authentication API Specification Relased by UIDAI