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Ponting’s retirement will leave a big hole: Hilditch

Melbourne: Ricky Ponting`s retirement in the next few years will have a similar “dramatic” impact on the Australian cricket which was witnessed after spin legend Shane Warne`s retreat, feels chief selector Andrew Hilditch.

Hailing Ponting`s “exceptional” leadership qualities, the National Selection Panel Chairman said it will be extremely difficult for anyone to fit into the shoes of Ponting.

“When we lose Ricky Ponting it will be as dramatic an impact as Shane Warne. Ricky`s shoes are massive shoes to fill. He has been a really strong man, really positive around the group,” Hilditch said.

“You can talk tactics all you want but in the end the captain is the person who has got to mould the side and make it a winning team. Ricky has done that exceptionally well,” he was quoted as saying.

Australia have been struggling to find a class spinner ever since Warne hung his boot in 2006. From Stuart McGill to Nathan Haurtiz they have tried a number of tweakers but no one has looked like even a shadow of Warne.

Hilditch said Michael Clarke`s elevation as the skipper of the national Twenty20 team will help them assess his leadership skills.

“The lucky thing is that Michael has got an opportunity in Twenty20 cricket to run a tournament. We have now got a six-month build-up for the next Twenty20 World Cup and he knows he is captain. It is a big moment for him.

“It is really good that he gets that opportunity so we get a good chance to assess whether he is the next person to do it in all forms of the game,” Hilditch said.

Hilditch though made it clear that mere cricketing skills won`t be sufficient to earn the captain`s cap.

“Tactically I think he is an excellent captain. There are other issues that you have got to get on top of if you want to do the job. It`s dealing with the pressure of the media and dealing with the pressure of managing your players who are going through difficult times away from their families.”

“It is about playing in different conditions where everything is going wrong and the training conditions aren`t what you want. It`s about getting up every day and leading by example,” he said.

New legislation on Judges’ accountability soon: Moily

The Centre plans to bring a “state-of-the-art” legislation in the Winter session of Parliament to deal with complaints of corruption against judges and ensure accountability in higher judiciary.

The Judges Standards and Accountability Bill will cover the “entire judiciary” and would not be a “one sided affair”. It would also provide appropriate protection to the judges so that “it will not be misused,” says Law and Justice Minister entire judiciary.

He said the Judges Inquiry Act of 1968 would be repealed once the proposed bill is adopted. “The Judges Inquiry Bill deals only with the impeachment process of judges. We want to replace it with a comprehensive Judges Standards and Accountability Bill,” he said.

The Government’s plan assumes significance in the context of growing complaints of misconduct against judges of the higher judiciary and a feeling that redress system was not effective.

The “forward looking” bill has been drafted after taking into consideration “the best of lessons” learnt from all over the world, including United Kingdom, France and the US.

“It would have clarity on all issues, including those related to prior the appointment and after the appointment of a judge,” Moily said, noting that it would cover the “entire judiciary.”

He, however, said the judiciary “cannot be kept in the same room with politicians. They cannot hold a press conference like politicians if something is said about them,” he explained.

Declining to reveal the salient features of the “most comprehensive legislation”, Moily said that the much talked about bill would soon be circulated to various ministries before being brought to the Union Cabinet.

The Untouchables: Bombay Police after 26/11

On a overcast April morning in the compound of a police barracks in central Bombay, a team of 6 young men in commando clothing, armed with AK-47’s and pistols, walked, crouched and lunged for our cameras. They simulated combat at close quarters: how to enter a building, guard its entrance, take control of the stairwell and burst into a room occupied by fictional terrorists. They were members of the Quick Response Team, or QRT, their existence a challenge to the much repeated cliché of a city police unprepared for the commando style attacks of last November. The QRT was created in 2003, after a series of bomb blasts in Bombay, precisely to counter a terrorist attack. Not to guard exits or form outer cordons or manage crowds, but to engage the bad guys. They were selected from among the constabulary for their youth and fitness. They trained with the army in Pune. They went to Manesar to train with the NSG. They have AK-47’s, 9mm pistols, bulletproof vests, imported helmets. They are divided into teams on multiple shifts, so that at any time of the day or night, one team of 12 commandoes is always on call, 24×7.

On their biggest night, they would barely fire more than a few rounds. By dawn, they were manning outer perimeters at the Taj and Trident. What went wrong? The answers are couched in that familiar, mystifying vagueness which has come to define Bombay police in its moment of reckoning: “We were called into action at ten pm. A team of 7 went to CST. We went from train to train clearing compartments. We surrounded a motor cabin on Platform 2 inside which two men were hiding. But it turned out to be false alarm. We realized by then the terrorists had left the station. We were told that they had gone towards Cama Hospital. As we left, we heard firing outside Metro cinema. We saw a Qualis with guns sticking out of the window. We fired at it. But by then it had sped off.” This from the team that went to the Trident Hotel: “6 of us entered the Trident. We saw glass, blood, bodies everywhere. A grenade dropped from one of the higher floors as we entered. We went up to the second floor going room by room. We didn’t know what we were looking for. We took turns in escorting guests to the exit. We thought we’d go right to the top and start clearing the floors, but we didn’t have enough numbers. We had been split up into very small groups. So we rescued guests and guarded the exits till the Navy commandos came.”

The exchange with the young commandoes of the QRT : S.I Vasave, S.I. Kerkar, constables Mhatre and Patil took place in a former complex of jail cells attached to the Bhoiwada police station, about 10 kilometers north of Victoria Terminus. Its walls are peeling, patches of damp everywhere. One of the now-empty lockups serves as the QRT’s main command post, with a roster sketched on a blackboard, and a wireless receiver propped on a table in the corner.  Flies buzz around puddles and mounds of garbage. On the iron bars of the cells, underwear and trousers are hung out to dry. This is where the city has chosen to house and headquarter its elite anti-terrorist force.

The QRT was orphaned almost as soon as it was created, the casualty of yet another departmental turf war. It was meant to be part of the crime branch of the city police, but was then brought under the command of the Anti Terror Squad. The ATS itself is a bastard child; it’s raised from the Maharashtra police, but the chief of the ATS reports to the Bombay police commissioner. That night, says S.I. Vasave, as we went from location to location, we had no one to guide us. The man who is meant to be in charge of the QRT, himself caught up in the anarchy of the night, called them just as they were setting off: “This is your first chance to prove yourself”, Hemant Karkare told them. “Kuch karke dikhana hai”. Just over two hours later, they would discover his body in a pool of blood in a lane behind Cama Hospital.

Bombay turns you into a crime reporter. It is home to the most storied police force in the country. The only police force where a sub-inspector (Daya Nayak) can inspire a clutch of Bollywood thrillers. The only force which has a celebrity sniffer dog: Zanjeer, the golden labrador that scented out the hidden caches of RDX in Thane and Mumbra in 1993. Zanjeer was sent off with full honours when he died in 2000. Not long after we moved to Bombay in 2003, on my first visit to police headquarters, I lingered on the magnificent wooden staircase that leads to the police commissioners office. On the wall curved a gallery of the city’s khakhi celebrities: Ribeiro, Soman, Samra, Mendonca, Singh.

On that day, I was on my way to meet Commissioner RS Sharma. The Telgi stamp paper scam had just broken. Sharma and several others, including the encounter specialist Pradeep Sawant were charged with bungling the investigation into Telgi, a forger of stamp paper. Over the next few weeks more than a dozen policemen – officers like Sharma and Sawant, but many others of varying ranks – were suspended, arrested and sent to jail. Later, Sharma was discharged and released. He said his release proved his case: that he was the victim of murky departmental rivalries. Many saw the Telgi purge as one of the worst moments in the history of the force. Worse than the 1992-93 riots, when the police was seen as nakedly communal? I asked an officer who was with the crime branch. Worse, he said.

In August of that same year, two blasts went off in the city – one at the Gateway of India, another in Zaveri Bazaar, a crowded marketplace in central Bombay. 54 people died. Acting on the basis of a tip off from a taxi driver, and using their network of informants, the  cracked the case within two months. One of the main accused was shot in an ‘encounter’. Three others were arrested. (They were recently sentenced.)

I had been in Bombay for only 6 months. I already had a taste of the fame and notoriety that is the legacy of its police force.

The city’s first police chief, an East India Company buccaneer called James Tod, was tried and sacked for corruption in 1790. “The principal witness against him (as must always happen)” wrote Sir James Mackintosh, “was his native receiver of bribes”. Charles Forjett, who became Commissioner almost a century later, was the police force’s first moderniser. He laid the ground for Bombay police’s high standards of detection. Forjett was Anglo Indian, and often moved around the city undercover to unearth crime, (“..the strong ’strain of the country’ in his blood enabled him, when disguised, to pass among natives of India as one of themselves”), a technique he used to expose the Bombay chapter of the mutineers of 1857. The mutineers were strapped to cannons and blown to bits on the Esplanade.

The weight of so much history needs a suitable setting. Wander through the streets of south Bombay and it’s a fair chance that some of the finest Victorian and Gothic architecture is police property: the Commissioner’s office in Crawford Market, the late-18th century ATS headquarters in Byculla (which was the earlier Commissionerate, in Forjett’s time), the Old Bazaar Gate Police Station (now the headquarters of DCP Zone 1), the Colaba Police station, built in 1906, and the Maharashtra Police Headquarters at Apollo Bunder, a grand old Gothic pile of blue basalt, once called Sailor’s Home. All these buildings are a stone’s throw away from the Taj, CST, Cama Hospital, Leopold’s, Nariman House. Unknowingly, the terrorists of 26/11 had wandered into the heart of police Bombay. As the gunmen from Pakistan killed, lingered, reloaded, and killed again, they would unravel the reputation – and the troubled core – of the country’s most celebrated police force.

There is a story the officers of Bombay police like to tell: of brotherhood, risk and the fight against evil. But it is a story that unfolds far away from Bombay, in the jungles of Vidharbha. Many of the officers in the ‘frontlines’ of 26/11 had done postings, often overlapping, in Maharashtra’s naxal-affected districts: Chandrapur, Gadchiroli, Bhandara. This, I am told again and again, is not a coincidence. “You see who was the first to rush to the spots that night.” Hemant Karkare (S.P. Chandrapur 1991), Sadandand Date (A.S.P. Bhandara 1995) and Ashok Kamte (A.S.P. Bhandara 1991) were at Cama, Deven Bharati (A.S.P Gadchiroli 1996) and Hemant Nagrale (A.S.P. Chandrapur, 1992) were at the Taj, Parambir Singh (S.P. Bhandara 1995) at the Trident, KP Raghuvanshi (SP, Gadchiroli, 1992) at VT. “You get that killer instinct when you are in the jungle. We used to sleep with our AK’s”, one of them tells me. In the context of the November attacks, this may seem ironic, even mildly absurd. But this is a force looking for redemption. The successes of Maharashtra’s police force in containing naxalism in Vidharbha in the early to mid-nineties are generally unchallenged, unlike the events of 26/11. There is a nostalgia for that time in the forest; many of them straight out of the Academy, thrust into a sort of Boy’s Own world of adventure and danger, away from the politics and intrigue of headquarters.

When I met Hemant Karkare for the first time in August last year, the walls of his office were mounted with tastefully polished driftwood in interesting shapes – a crucifix, a stag’s head – picked up from the jungles of Chandrapur. He was precise, almost formal. But that evening he was incensed. Both the ATS and the Crime Branch of the Bombay police were chasing a key informant, a car thief called Afzal Usmani, a crucial link to the Bombay module of the Indian Mujahideen (IM). The IM have been blamed for the series of bomb blasts across India in 2008. The Crime Branch got to him first. Usmani led them to the entire local IM module, and then, when the ATS asked for his custody, he ‘vanished’. The IM case had gone out of the ATS’s hands. (The Crime Branch says they had nothing to do with the disappearance of the informant.)

Karkare wanted to complain to the DGP, AN Roy. But Roy was fighting his own battles. His status at DGP faced a number of legal challenges. And, going by the buzz in police circles, he was said to be locked in a factional war with Police Commissioner Hassan Gafoor. Roy’s admirers, most of whom served under him when Roy was Bombay’s police commissioner, found Gafoor uncommunicative and bureaucratic, not a leader of men. Gafoor’s supporters claimed this was untrue, that Gafoor was competent, but less publicity-seeking than Roy.

Jailhouse Mock

In Madhur Bhandarkar’s Jail, there is a scene where two inmates are chatting, before they turn in for the night.

One of them, a grizzled old veteran with a Tagorey beard called Ghosh Babu, is asked by his companion why on earth he’s languishing in prison despite getting so many international awards. Ghosh sighs and explains that he was accused of siding with the Naxals and thrown into prison, and that ‘when the Government gives rewards like this, it doesn’t look at awards.’

As that little vignette on Dr Binayak Sen illustrates, it’s this harebrained topicality-as-gimmick approach that mars most of the director’s efforts, trying to cash in on everything he reads in the papers. Sorry, everything everyone’s read in the papers.

So a wealthy upstart inside for a hit-and-run casually mentioning he mowed down six people (not four, not seven) on the road isn’t a coincidence. Honestly, by now, Madhur should really dispense with the obligatory ‘all characters and events are fictional’ disclaimer at the front of his films.

And for our part we really should stop treating them like films. Bhandarkar’s modus operandi is simple, to pick out a subject, decided on its stereotyped negatives, ones that are already more than well-entrenched in the public consciousness, and then vilify it. Yet even by his usual standards, this latest project suffers from a cinematic sin even worse than self-righteousness: Jail is a bloody bore.

Neil Nitin Mukesh , still sticking to looking frightened and perplexed, plays Parag Dixit, imprisoned on a drugs charge based on circumstantial evidence. That’s pretty much the synopsis of the entire film, one that drags on and on without either narrative reprieve or anything compelling.

The detailing is shoddy, the characters cardboard and the dialogue plain laughable. Jail is a formulaic, below average Bollywood headache, slowed down to lugubrious dullness. So much so that even ever-disastrous background score man Amar Mohile ditches his overloud hoo-ha for some insipid piano tinkling. Groan.

Leave it be, this prison of cardboard and cliche. We all deserve better.

Why India bought IMF gold

It has been an incredible turnaround for India.

In 1991, New Delhi kick-started the economic reforms process owing mainly to the serious balance of payments crisis it was facing. Then, India — just an inch away from defaulting on its loans — had less than $2 billion in forex reserves (that would not even have taken care of three weeks’ of imports) and had to pledge gold with the International Monetary Fund to get a loan to get out of the crisis.

Today, it is the IMF that has sold gold to India to ‘borrow’ money to loan to poor nations!

That is indeed irrefutable proof that the economic reforms that Manmohan Singh (the then finance minister and current prime minister) set in motion have borne fruit.

On September 18, 2009, the IMF’s executive board approved gold sales strictly limited to 403.3 metric tonnes, representing one eighth of its total holdings.

India and China were seen as the likely buyers the IMF gold, given the two Asian giants’ economic strength even in the face of the global recession that ravaged most economies.

Many analysts were surprised at the speed with which India bought the IMF gold. However, they believe that it is a very smart move as by buying IMF gold, New Delhi is shoring up its bullion reserves and slowly trying to hedge its bets on the US dollar which has been losing value against other currencies.

Some analysts believe that India could be buying the yellow metal to push for a larger voting share in the IMF. India has been angling for a larger say in world economic affairs and for a bigger representation in the IMF.

The RBI, meanwhile, says that the buying of IMF gold was just a part of its foreign exchange reserve management strategy.

The RBI paid on average about $1,045 per ounce for the gold and the transaction would be paid in hard currency and not in IMF Special Drawing Rights, the IMF’s internal unit of account.

IMF, meanwhile, has not given out any details on whether any other central banks had shown interest in buying the remaining 203.3 tonnes of gold on tap for sale.

For long, China has been slowly but steadily building up its stockpile of gold and India does not want to be left behind.

India among top 50 in global competitiveness

India ranks 49 among 133 countries in 2009-10 in the global competitiveness index prepared by the World Economic Forum, an improvement of one position from last year. India’s position is a result of mixed performance across 12 categories covered by the GCI.

India has displayed good performance over the past year in business sophistication, innovation and financial market sophistication. However, areas like infrastructure, primary education, health and the fiscal situation dragged India down.

The review also stated that bureaucracy, over-regulation and corruption still affect functioning markets and labour markets in particular. India lags all BRIC nations in the index.

India has suffered in the basic requirements index and ranks 101 in the health and education index. The fiscal deficit situation has dragged India to the 96th position in the macroeconomic stability pillar, while poor infrastructure performance has brought it down to 76th position in the transport and infrastructure index. India has performed well in areas of sound financial system, efficient goods market and innovation sectors and ranks in the range of 16-30 in the respective indices.

A survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers, which took responses from 300 Indian CEOs, revealed that most expect growth to come from better penetration of existing markets, with 58 per cent citing that as their primary opportunity. Most Indian companies said they would be able to achieve growth organically.

Moreover, 42 per cent said the country’s manufacturing sector is becoming more competitive. As many as 74 per cent believed India to have a strong supply of educated and healthy workers and 56 per cent stated a strong entrepreneurial base existed.

Lack of infrastructure, inflation, red tapism and terrorism were cited as risks in our business competitiveness.

M&M to launch motorcycle next year

 

Mahindra and Mahindra plans to launch a motorcycle next year. The company is also looking at acquisitions in the electronic scooter space.

To increase its penetration, the company is planning to tie-up with cooperatives and grameen banks.

The auto major had entered the two-wheeler market market by acquiring the assets of Pune-based scooter manufacturer Kinetic [ Get Quote ] Motor in 2008.

Speaking to reporters after launching their new scooter brands, Rodeo and Duro, the vice-president, sales and customer care, Sanjiv Mittal, said the company was working on motorcycle models and the first one would be launched in 2010.

The vehicle is in the developmental stage and the objective was to become a full-fledged two-wheeler player.

Mittal said the company’s Madhya Pradesh [ Images ] facility would be sufficient to meet the company’s requirements.

“We just need some small investment to install some machines and the facility can produce up to 400,000 vehicles,” he said.

He added the company had sold around 7,000 scooters last month, of which Rodeo and Duro accounted for 5,600 units and Flyte accounted for the rest.

He declined to comment on the sales target for 2009-10. The company is in the process of ramping up its two-wheeler distribution network by adding 50 more dealers.

The company has 325 dealerships and plans to increase the network to 375 dealers by the end of this financial year, Mittal said.

To increase penetration and to address any financial issues, the company planned to tie up with co-operatives and grameen banks for both finance and marketing.

The company had already tied-up with five finance institutions, he said.

Sikh protestors block rail tracks in Ludhiana

 

Protesting the Centre’s alleged inaction against the 1984 riots accused, more than 200 activists of various Sikh outfits on Friday blocked rail tracks on the Ludhiana-Delhi section.

A group of protestors led by Surjit Singh, president of a Sikh group, Danga Peerat Association, squatted on the rail tracks in Ludhiana and raised slogans against the government.

As a result, the New Delhi-bound Shatabdi Express, which was scheduled to leave the city at 7 am, was detained by the railway authorities at the station.

The super fast train was later sent to the national capital via Dhuri, railway sources said. Demanding justice to the victims of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots and action against the guilty, Sikh groups have been holding protests in Punjab

IBM launches development and test cloud

With a nod toward the heterogeneous application development environments that exist in most enterprise IT departments, IBM on Wednesday launched a pair of services targeted at building cloud applications.

The first, the IBM Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud, is a cloud service hosted in IBM’s data centers that provides tools and interfaces designed to support developers using Java, .NET, and Open Source environments. This service provides computing and storage capacity, and support for WebSphere middleware, Rational Software Delivery Services, and its Information Management database. It also provides “pre-configured integrations” of some Rational services based on IBM’s Jazz framework, its collaborative software platform.

There are no pre-configured integrations announced for third-party or open source tools or languages.

In addition to the Smart Business offering, IBM is adding private cloud-targeted tools and services to the IBM Rational Software Delivery Services for Cloud Computing offering. These tools and services target three key elements of the development and testing of cloud applications:

* Agile development services, aimed at enabling collaborative development and testing through a set of best practices.

* An integrated set of services for test management and planning and test lab management.

* Tools, such as IBM Rational Asset Manager, which are targeted at increasing the efficiency of distributed application development teams.

By combining the expertise gained by IBM’s Global Services organizations and the Rational Lab Services team in building and delivering development and test tools and practices in IBM-based clouds, the company hopes to become a one-stop shop for companies looking for a solid return on investment from adopting the cloud model in development and test.

IBM Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud can be accessed as a free beta, and the IBM Rational Software Delivery Services for private clouds are also available in beta through the companies sales force.

Date named for rail line takeover

National Express will hand the running of the East Coast Main Line to the government at one minute to midnight on Friday 13 November.

The government said in July that it would take over the route, which runs trains between London and Edinburgh.

Ministers had refused National Express’s requests for its contract with the government to be renegotiated.

National Express said it did not expect passengers, services or employees to be affected by the handover.

The company has been struggling with the franchise since it turned out that the amount it agreed to pay to run services on the line was too much.

National Express agreed in 2007 to pay £1.4bn over seven years to run the line.

Staff transferred

The transport group stressed that its two other rail franchises would not be affected by the transfer of the East Coast franchise, although the government had threatened to take them back when National Express decided to hand back the East Coast franchise.

National Express East Anglia runs trains from the east of England to London Liverpool Street as well as operating the Stansted Express, while c2c operates in the south of Essex, with trains going into London Fenchurch Street.

The East Coast franchise will now be operated by a government-controlled group called Directly Operated Railways.

Staff currently employed on the line by National Express will transfer to the new company.

It is expected to stay in government hands until 2011 when there is likely to be a fresh auction.