India ranked second from last in globalisation
Washington: India has been placed at 49th position out of 50 developed and key developing countries in terms of depth of globalisation achieved, only leaving behind Iran, while Singapore is at the on the top. The rankings published in A T Kearny, a foreign policy magazine, which has produced an index to measure the extent of globalisation in the world, puts India almost at the bottom in globalisation but says NRIs play an "extremely important role" in sustaining its economy. According to the study, India scored particularly well on the indicator for transfer payments, which includes both official funds transferred from governments and international organisations as well as remittances from nationals living abroad.

Among other measures, India scored dead last on indicators for international travel and tourism and international telephone calls. There were 2,359,000 international travelers visiting India in 1998. For international telephone calls, there were 1,499 million minutes of incoming calls and 436 million minutes of outgoing calls. Minutes per capita per year of international telephone calls were only 1.98. India also ranked poor in levels of Internet penetration with only one Internet server per 100,000 people in 1998. Its Internet infrastructure was ranked lagging behind many African countries.
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Government likely to offload PSU stake to FIs
New Delhi: The Department of disinvestment is reported to be working on a new to allow offloading of government stake in blue chip public sector units to financial institutions (FIs). The proposed scheme would be a slightly revised version of the original plan earlier mooted by former finance secretary Mr. Vijay Kelkar.

Under the proposed plan, the FIs can take a decision on whether to buy government stake or not on a case-to-case basis. Some of the FIs, which are expected to acquire government stake, include Unit Trust of India, State Bank of India, Industrial Development Bank of India and Infrastructure Development Finance Corporation.

FIs had prepared a report, in which they had identified more than half a dozen blue chip companies in which they were interested in picking up stake.

Once the modalities are finalised, the DoD is expected to approach the cabinet committee on disinvestment with firm proposals on about half a dozen PSUs, including Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd. and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd. The government would however, in most cases retain the 26 per cent stake required to maintain the management control. Presently, disinvestment by the usual route of bidding takes a minimum of 12 to 18 months, making it difficult to meet the target of Rs 10,000 crore this fiscal. Of the 33 companies on which the DoD has started working, no company has yet been sold.
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