Adarsh Gopalakrishnan

It's been a rollercoaster year… A bull market rolled in with healthy growth, scams, allegations of market fixing kept
the year ticking quite interestingly. Here's a little list of what we would like to do differently in 2011.

Let it be a scam-free year! It's been a long drawn-out year (with limited resolution) with the spectrum scam,
Commonwealth Games, allegations of price-fixing, Adarsh housing scam, Bangalore plot scam. Let's try and keep the
list as short as possible next year, please.

Our first wish, let's stop squabbling over where and how exchanges should list and get them on their toes again. Let's
give MCX a shot at the stock exchange business and see if it can shake things up! Hopefully, more competition will
mean a better deal and experience for investors!

Whose bright idea was it to call a guy willing to part with Rs 2 lakh on a single IPO, a retail investor? Let's give the
little guy a chance by getting back to our old limits of a lakh.

Another year has passed with fixed deposits not giving us reasonable returns to buy the same bag of rice I bought a
year ago… Isn't it about time we got a good corporate bond market up and running?

Even if we can't get higher rates on our bank deposits, the Government could compensate us with a few more of
those dazzling and reasonably-priced PSU IPO's.

Why not make it mandatory for companies to give their shareholders a specified portion of the profits they make by
selling part or whole businesses? After all, investors too should have the option of cashing out in the event of a
significant or entire business being sold, especially when the reason for picking up shares in the first place no longer
exists.

I may not be in for a raise this year… So how about the government considering a nice little home loan waiver
package to get me spending more aggressively. I heard Aladdin's lamp is up for auction on e-bay… Besides, it would
help those poor bankers and suffering real-estate companies.

Wish the government would take a cold, hard look at the way petroleum products are taxed. They had a look at the
pricing part of it, how about the taxing angle?

Airlines blame the oil prices, infrastructure, pilot-shortage, among a host of factors, but would it not be nice to pay just
15-20 per cent more than for a nice train ticket to get to some place in a fraction of the time. So, we are going to cross
our fingers and hope that airline tickets get cheap and stay that way.

As an afterthought, airlines are never going to get cheap unless they've got some serious competition; so how about
sprucing up our aging railway system? Come to think of it, its about time we got to work on that eternal promise of
better infrastructure! Roads, ports, railways, hospitals… You know the list!

Mr Kapil Sibal made all the right noises while at HRD, but before he could get cracking, his work load was up multi-
fold with the broken telecom ministry coming under his fold. We've got a lot of mopping up to do, starting with the
numerous boards in existence for school and, then, we've got a dysfunctional graduate churning college system to
fix. This could possibly be the most challenging problem on our little list.

We've got fancier malls and grocery stores to shop at, now is the time to figure out how to keep them well stocked
with food at reasonable prices. A push for the much-needed agricultural reforms starting with improving yields right
down to consolidating land and improving supply chains and more efficient markets for farmers to sell produce at. If
you thought the infrastructure list was long, try making this one!

2010 was marked by gold hitting multi-year highs, governments in the US and Europe printing and shovelling more
money at the economy and some serious currency wrangling with the US and China agreeing to disagree on what
each other's currencies are worth. Come to think of it, what is a piece of paper with a promise on it worth?
The time has possibly come to take a real hard look at money; what's backing the promise and the magnitude of the
promises that have and are being made!