21st February

Lend and Spend

The article strongly calls for use of monetary policy as a stimulus to the economic downturn currently affecting India. 

Although India is being projected to show around 6% growth in the fiscal year 2009-10, there is a room for improvement if India uses its monetary policy judiciously to enable growth as rightly pointed out by the Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia. So far the intrepid monetary policy has effectively mitigated the crisis in the Indian market as investment in rural and public sector projects as well as housing has showed positive results along with upturn in certain industries like steel, cement, auto and FMCG. But the time has come when complacency has to go. RBI needs to think seriously on the lines of rate cut as industrial production, consumer spending, investment has gone down, corporate margins shrank and jobs are in danger. Overseas funds are hardly coming and banks have become risk averse as they avoid lending out of fear of defaults. 

Indian consumer has a tendency to save more which is good but not when the expectation is for price fall which creates a deflationary spiral. The 13-month low inflation of 3.92% calls for both, fiscal and monetary, stimulus to spur consumption. What is needed for govt is to provide more fiscal stimulus packages and banks to jettison conservatism. Money that is parked with banks and consumers has to turn into money lend and spend.

To Face The Music

The article talks about the recent development in the forensic technology where DNA can help in generating the entire face which police can then look for. The technology would be available in few years which can then be used in anthropology domain as well.

Till now DNA at the crime site was used to identify a suspect’s DNA with high accuracy (99.99%). This is certainly better then relying on police sketch artists and relying on someone’s memory which is again subjected to individual interpretation. However, as announced at American Association for the Advancement of Science by Mark Shriver, an anthropologist and geneticist at Pennsylvania State University, DNA can now be used to generate a perfect face of a person. The technology is called forensic molecular photo-fitting and relies on mapping genes that are linked with skin pigmentation and other groups of genes that control facial structures to build a complete image on computer. The same technology can also be used to generate a face of a person whose remains have been severely damaged or decomposed. 

Besides forensic, the technology can also be used to generate faces of people who lived in pre-photography era or even the most ancient people and extinct animals.