Today's Hot Stories - March 22, 2014 - PT education

Today's Hot Stories - March 22, 2014

10 Headlines for Today

(1) UPA veterans opt out of LS race as focus shifts to Rahul
(2) Jaswant Singh may fight as independent from Barmer
(3) China's Xi Jinping on first Europe tour
(4) AirAsia India receives its first plane from Airbus
(5) Govt raises Rs.5,560 crore from Axis stake sale
(6) 'France open to more investment in India'
(7) T-20 cricket: India strangle Pakistan in opening game
(8) Football: PSG maintain title march against Lorient
(9) Tennis: Sony Open: Andy Murray wobbles into third round
(10) World faces 'water-energy' crisis: UN

5 Stories for Today

(1) Bookies bet big on high-stakes polls
(2) Flight MH370 mystery enters third week, search finds only frustration and suspicion
(3) Food chains ride home on tweets, apps
(4) Amid Crimean blues, OECD cautions on economic scars
(5) Raghuram Rajan: RBI yet to adopt inflation targeting, talks on with govt

(1) Bookies bet big on high-stakes polls


They are not political scientists or psephologists, but driven by systematic calculations, punters try their luck in gauging the electoral mood to make a quick buck.

If bookies are to be believed, thousands of crores of rupees are riding on the Lok Sabha election.

“In 2009, thousands of crores rode on the election, but this time, with bookies active in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Kolkata and Delhi accepting bets from punters, the stakes are even higher,” a Thane-based operator told The Hindu.

They accept rates from punters mostly over the phone. Most of them are on the move and operate from moving cars to evade arrest. The police, on their part, put their cellphone numbers on surveillance.

Offshore syndicates run the illegal business with money accepted and returned through hawala channels. With no stringent laws in place, the bookies, if arrested, manage to get bail easily, a senior police officer here said.

Rates declared

This week, the bookies declared their rates for the 543 Lok Sabha seats to which elections are being held in different phases over two months.

By their calculations, the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) is expected to perform better than the Congress. “… the BJP should get around 200 seats,” a bookie from the western suburbs of Mumbai said.

Throwing light on the business, he explained how the syndicate works: “We derived our poll figures by closely studying the markets and taking into consideration the various surveys before offering the rates.”

For the likely scenario of the BJP winning 200 seats, the bookies offer 24 paisa for every one rupee bet — if they party manages to win 200 seats, the punter takes home Rs. 1.24.

The bookies calculate that the Congress is expected to win 75 to 85 seats.

The rate offered for 75 seats won by the Congress is 24 paise, while for 85 seats, it is Rs.1.60. They say the Aam Aadmi Party will end up with a single-digit tally.

“The cricket season has been very disappointing. We had incurred a huge loss of around Rs.500 crore, and we are hoping to recover it during the election,” another bookie from Kurla, a central suburb of Mumbai, said.

The bookies circuit has bet on Narendra Modi of the Bharatiya Janata Party as the next Prime minister. While Mr. Modi is offered 42 paisa, Rahul Gandhi is second at Rs.6.75.

The Mumbai Police are keeping a close tab on the bookies. “The Crime Branch is closely monitoring the bookies,” Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime) Sadanand Date told The Hindu.

Source: The Hindu

(2) Flight MH370 mystery enters third week, search finds only frustration and suspicion


Two weeks after a Malaysia Airlines jet carrying 239 people vanished, an international search deep in the southern Indian Ocean stepped up on Saturday even as Australia cautioned the investigation's best lead remained a tentative one.

Officials are bracing for the "long haul" as searches by more than two dozen countries turn up little but frustration and fresh questions about Flight MH370 which vanished on a scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8.

Six aircraft and two merchant ships are now scouring an area of the remote southern Indian Ocean where suspected debris was spotted by satellite earlier this week.

Australia, which announced the potential find and is coordinating the rescue, has cautioned the objects might be a lost shipping container or other debris.

"Even though this is not a definite lead, it is probably more solid than any other lead around the world and that is why so much effort and interest is being put into this search," acting Australian Prime Minister Warren Truss told reporters at a Perth airforce base.

China, Japan and India are sending more planes and Australian and Chinese navy vessels are also steaming towards the zone, more than 2,000km (1,200 miles) southwest of Perth.

Weather conditions are good, with 10km (6 miles) of visibility, according to search officials — a crucial boost for a search that is relying more on human eyes than the technical wizardry of the most advanced aircraft in the world.

"While these aircraft are equipped with very advanced technology, much of this search is actually visual," said Truss, who also warned that the objects detected by satellites may now be at the bottom of the Indian Ocean.

"It is a very remote area, but we intend to continue the search until we are absolutely satisfied that further searching would be futile, and that day is not in sight," he said.

Australian Maritime Safety Authority spokesman John Young said the operation was still considered search and rescue.

"The plan is we want to find these objects because they are the best lead to where we might find people to be rescued," he said.

Clock ticking

Malaysian defence minister Hishammuddin Hussein said searchers were facing the "long haul" but were conscious that the clock was ticking. The plane's "black box" voice and data recorder only transmits an electronic signal for about 30 days before its battery dies, after which it will be far more difficult to locate.

Aircraft and ships have also renewed the search in the Andaman Sea between India and Thailand, going over areas that have already been exhaustively swept to find some clue to unlock one of the biggest mysteries in modern aviation.

Investigators suspect the Boeing 777, which took off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing shortly after midnight on March 8, was deliberately diverted thousands of miles from its scheduled path. They say they are focusing on hijacking or sabotage but have not ruled out technical problems.

The Telegraph newspaper published what it said was a transcript of communications between the cockpit of Flight MH370 and Malaysian air control, but few if any new clues emerged.

The search itself has strained ties between China and Malaysia, with Beijing repeatedly leaning on the Southeast Asian nation to step up its hunt and do a better job at looking after the relatives of the Chinese passengers.

For families of the passengers, the process has proved to be an emotionally wrenching battle to elicit information, their angst fuelled by a steady stream of speculation and false leads.

Some experts have argued that the reluctance to share sensitive radar data and capabilities in a region fraught with suspicion amid China's military rise and territorial disputes may have hampered the search.

Two people familiar with the investigation said the search had been slowed in some cases by delays over the paperwork to allow foreign maritime surveillance aircraft into territorial waters without a formal diplomatic request.

Truss said he was grateful for the search craft offered by China and others, which are expected to arrive at the Australian airforce base on Saturday.

Australian rescue coordinators said they are awaiting confirmation of the planes and ships offered before they are included in any search schedules.

Source: The Times of India

(3) Food chains ride home on tweets, apps


About 5,000 registered customers tweet to order desi style wraps and rolls from fast food chain Faaso's. Domino's Pizza has had a million downloads of its delivery mobile app launched 24 months ago. These are some figures reflecting how young Indians are using smartphones to kill their hunger. They are reaching out to their favourite eating joints on mobile phones even as long travel time and hectic professional careers increase dependence on prepared food.

A report by retail constancy firm Tecknopak, shared exclusively with TOI, said food services companies are using social media, mobile and the internet for its cost-effectiveness and instant reach.

Faaso's - a five year-old chain with 65 outlets across Mumbai, Bangalore and Pune - gets more than 15% of its orders through the web and mobile platforms and expects business through this vertical doubling in the next six months.

It is not just the national chains alone that are riding on this home delivery model. Bangalore-based Ammi's Biryani and Mani's Dum Biryani are launching mobile apps next month, bypassing even the internet appealing to the young tech-savvy consumer.

"Youngsters are increasingly spending more time on their phones than on their desktops or watching television. Identifying this, we started taking orders on Twitter," said Soumyadeep Barman, head of marketing and technology, at Faaso's, which is funded by Sequoia Capital.

This is in sync the broader experiences of traditional retailers, who are realizing the e-tailing potential as against only brick-and-mortar format, said the Tecknopak report titled India Food Services Trends 2014.

"We have seen the progression of consumers shifting from calls to internet and now to ordering on smartphones," said Joseph Cherian, chief executive of GFA Global, which operates 78 Pizza Corner outlets in India. The company launched a mobile app just two months ago.

Mobile apps give the added advantage of customizing and tracking customer orders which helps in developing stickiness and higher repeat orders.

Tecknopak data showed that 78% of the food services outlets in Mumbai have delivery options. It is 61% in the Delhi National Capital Region and 48% in Bangalore. Domino's Pizza, the market leader in the organized pizza business, received 50% of the last quarter revenue, pegged at Rs 385 crore, from deliveries, according to Tecknopak. And 14% of those home deliveries came via orders on internet and mobile apps.

Online food ordering platform Food Panda gets 25% orders through its mobile app. "We are seeing a phenomenal 60-70% growth month-on-month in orders made through our app. Mobile is eating in to the share of internet as an ordering medium," said Rohit Chadda, MD and India co-founder of Food Panda, backed by Berlin-based incubator of internet startups.

"Urban youth, the biggest user of social media platforms, is the primary target group of most restaurant formats. And engaging through social media makes enormous business sense," said Tarun Jain VP, Food Services & Agriculture, at Tecknopak. Chadda, however, said that smaller players would benefit by being on a platform like Food Panda instead of building individual apps as customers are unlikely to download each of these on their phones.

Navaj Sharief of Ammi's Biryani believes that his mobile app and social media initiatives drive an additional 15% growth to the home-delivery business. Jayanth Narayanan of Mani's Dum Biryani said, "We expect both internet and mobile app to bring additional 10% each to out delivery vertical. But going forward it will be the mobile application that would grow faster."

Source: The Economic Times

(4) Amid Crimean blues, OECD cautions on economic scars


The US and European economies may be showing strong signs of revival but there is much underneath that shows the social fallout of the 2008 financial crisis may linger on for years to come, says a report by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

The report says India’s society is also wading through a crisis of confidence.

The Paris-based international organisation helping governments tackle the economic, social and governance challenges of a globalised economy has painted a grim picture in a new report that says governments must brace themselves with “crisis-proofed” policies that cut back on bureaucracy and administration.

The report comes at a time when the European Union is grappling with the idea of imposing sanctions on Russia over the Crimean crisis and has been unable to walk its tough talk.

Any sanctions aimed at really hurting Russia would also hurt Europe. Russia is Europe’s third largest trading partner and its biggest supplier of crude oil (34.5%) and natural gas (31.8%).

Europe can neither afford an energy crisis nor a trade war at this juncture. Even France is reluctant to stall its 1.2 billion euro deal to sell two Mistral helicopter carriers to Russia.

OECD’s “Society At A Glance” report on 34 countries including India says confidence in institutions and government has plummeted 26.5% since 2007.

At 30%, the number of young people in India that are neither studying nor in jobs is the highest among the countries in the report. However, life expectancy of the

Indian population has increased by 16.4 years since 1970.

In OECD countries, 48 million people are unemployed, an increase by one third since 2007. More than half of young people in France and Germany only have temporary jobs and the number of people living in households without any income from work has doubled in Greece, Ireland and Spain.

Source: Hindustan Times

(5) Raghuram Rajan: RBI yet to adopt inflation targeting, talks on with govt


Reserve Bank Governor Raghuram Rajan today said the central bank is yet to move to inflation targeting and is still in discussions with the government on the same.

He also reiterated his preference for targeting retail price inflation.

"We haven't moved into inflation targeting as yet… That's something the Urjit Patel committee suggested, and its not something the RBI has accepted," Rajan said in his keynote address at the convocation of the central bank-run Indira Gandhi Institute for Development Research here.

Also read: Raghuram Rajan’s moves in forex market may keep Indian rupee in check

On adopting CPI inflation as the benchmark for fighting price rise, he said "we probably should focus on CPI rather than WPI.

"What the RBI has said is that we are exploring the recommendations of the Urjit Patel report, and there are some aspects of it which have to be discussed with the government.

"We have to explore some of these aspects with the government, including the setting up of a monetary policy committee, including what, if any, the inflation target will be," he explained.

On retail inflation, he said: "We need to bring CPI down. Whatever level it comes down to, but the path to bring it down to is 8 per cent by the end of this year, and 6 per cent at the end of the second year."

The Patel report has called for moving away from the current wholesale price index based inflation to retail price based CPI inflation as the chief data point for RBI to set inflation expectations.

The report, released early January, has also called for inflation targeting, which is a process under which Parliament should set a target on inflation for the central bank.

The report, penned by the deputy governor Patel has accordingly proposed a CPI target of 8 per cent by January next and 6 per cent by January 2016.

CPI index for February came in at 8.1 per cent and WPI at 4.78 per cent for the month.

Calling for sustained low inflation, Rajan said across the world, people have discovered that allowing inflation to rise eventually has costs, and does not have benefits.

He also debunked the growth-inflation trade-off saying the long run trade-off between growth and inflation doesn't exist.

"In the long-run, people get wiser. You can't fool them (the public), and you don't get any additional growth...you get growth from other things, but not from generating inflation."

However, he said that continued inflation fighting could inflict a cost on growth in the short-run.

"In the short run, there may be a cost to bringing down inflation in terms of growth. But in the long-run, bringing down inflation is a good thing and helps sustainable growth."

Rajan, known as a monetary economist focusing on inflation control, has increased repo rates in three out of four policy reviews since taking charge last September. He will unveil the next policy on April 1.

Source: The Indian Express

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