Steel Minister Birender Singh is known for being frank about the functioning of his Ministry. At a recent award ceremony to felicitate performers in the steel sector, Singh shared an anecdote on how he was approached by participants to tweak the judging criteria.
The Minister said that this literally defeated the purpose of fair competition and such rigging should be discouraged. Commenting on the hefty prize money, Singh also said that these monies should not just go into the promoter’s pockets, but must be shared with workers.
Accounting jugglers
The Coal and Power Ministries have been looking at the cost of power generation from completely different lenses.
The Power Ministry is claiming that there has been a hike in the cost of power generation due to coal and rail related issues. The Coal Ministry on the other hand has been claiming that the cost of coal for power generation has come down. Both ministries have also given out numbers to back their claims.
Despite the claims and counter claims, the truth is that power distribution companies and consumers will have to bear the higher costs.
Lockheed Martin moves fast
Last week as tensions rose between India and Pakistan, truth was perhaps the biggest casualty. Fake news manufacturers went on an overdrive as even verified Twitter handles retweeted and shared fake news links and claims.
So much so that Lockheed Martin India had to step in to bust some fake news claims.
On Friday, several verified Pakistani Twitter handles including that of Danyal Gilani, Chairman of Pakistan’s Central Film Censor Board, some Pakistani TV channels and journalists started tweeting out a link of a fake news item claiming that F-16’s manufacturer Lockheed Martin was going to be filing a suit against Indian claims of shooting down Pakistan’s F-16.
The company swiftly swung into action to counter this fake news. The verified Twitter handle of Lockheed Martin India tweeted out that the company, “had made no such comments.” Gilani had to delete the tweet and acknowledge that the statement was wrongly attributed to the company.
Guessing Game
With general elections expected in the next few months, there is a new game in town — predicting the likely outcome and taking a punt on who will form the next government. With the many predictions doing the rounds,brokerage houses too are putting out research notes and doing the scenario building for investors.
For instance, Ambit Capital Research has laid out four such scenarios for the poll outcomes and even taken a shot at who could be the Prime Minister if any of those four scenarios became a reality. It has now assigned a 20 per cent probability to the possibility of the BJP-led coalition assuming power with Narendra Modi as Prime Minister. Now the moot question for investors is that whether this prognosis was made before the current Indo-Pak skirmish or after.
Either way, it’s a difficult call given that this research house has assigned 40 per cent probability of resurgent Congress coming to power. Surely, a difficult trade this!
Non-vegetarians rejoice
Ex-promoters of Fortis, siblings Shivinder and Malvinder Singh’s exit from the business has buoyed the hospital staff for many reasons. One of them is food. The brothers are ardent devotees of the Radha Soami sect and had banned non-vegetarian food from being brought into the hospital premises, even in the administrative section. And employees caught with bringing non-vegetarian food were severely reprimanded, and faced the risk of losing their jobs.
So the Fortis board disassociating itself from the brothers has brought cheer to the employees. Also, banning non-vegetarian food in the hospital had led to many patients from the Middle East opting for other hospitals. Our Delhi Bureau