Falling shares wipe out Indian funds' 2007 gains

Actively managed diversified stock funds in India, which posted their best annual returns in four years in 2007, lost all their gains of last year in the first half of 2008, data from fund tracker Lipper showed.These funds’ net values plunged 38.8 percent on an average as weak global markets and concern on domestic economy under pressure of inflation triggered a fall in local stocks, hurting large bets in financial and capital goods sectors even more.

Nine out of ten such funds fell more than India’s benchmark stock index, which posted its biggest monthly loss in 16 years in June, extending the fall to just over a third in the first half.

Equity funds had risen an average 55.97 percent in 2007 to record their best annual returns in four years.

"This time I think the first six months have certainly caught everyone unawares," Sanjay Santhanam, director of Canara Robeco Asset Management, a joint venture between Canara Bank and Dutch fund firm Robeco.

"They are probably overweight on a few sectors and companies. So that is where they have taken a hit," Aditya Agarwal, joint managing director at fund tracker ICRA Online, said.

Diversified funds invested more than a fourth of their assets in financial services and capital goods sectors consistently in 2008 and suffered as the BSE Bankex and BSE Capital Goods indices tumbled more than 48 percent.

Larger bets on relatively illiquid medium and small-sized firms, commanding an allocation of more than 40 percent of the assets, deepened the looses with the BSE Mid Cap and BSE Small Cap indices dipping more than 44 percent each.

Financial sector funds lost the most, sliding 45 percent, as stocks were hit on expected monetary tightening by the central bank on spiralling inflation, which rose to 11.42 percent in the 12 months to June 14, its highest in more than 13 years.

Gold exchange traded funds were the top performing category,

rising nearly 20 percent, as the yellow metal prices in the local market showed sharper gains compared to foreign markets owing to a fall in the rupee against the dollar.

On June 30, spot gold rate quoted by a bank was at 13,120 rupees per 10 grams, up 21 percent from 10,854 rupees at the beginning of the year.

'Today's parents are poor role models'

Parents are usually considered to be a child’s first teachers and role models. But, a study has some dampening news for today’s generation of adults - you’re responsible for your kid’s lack of basic moral values.

Researchers at the Children’s Society in Britain have carried out the study and found that children aren’t acquiring basic moral values nowadays because today’s parents are actually poor role models.

For their study, the researchers questioned 1,176 people - they found that two thirds of adults believe that the moral values of young people have declined considerably since the time when they were young, the Times reported. According to the society, the rise of the celebrity culture and weakening family bonds are undermining traditional moral values among young people.

But it has also blamed adults for failing to engage with children and being too eager to criticise their behaviour rather than just intervening and helping them to navigate the challenges of modern life.

According to Bob Reitemeier, the chief executive of the society, adults need to take more responsibility for the young people around them. "We reap what we sow when it comes to teaching children values. Every adult plays a vital role, which we should nurture as much as we can.

"Unfortunately, it is easier to criticise children than to invest in them, and it is the children most in need of positive role models who are becoming disconnected from their communities and wider society."

'Dangerous' words to label N-waste

How will "DANGER!" be written 5,000 years from now? How will it be written in 50,000 years? Finding an answer to these questions may not seem like a Code Red emergency to most people. But for a growing cadre of scientists, figuring out how to alert our distant descendants to perilous nuclear waste entombed hundreds of metres below ground has become a fascinating task.

After more than six decades, high-level nuclear detritus is piling up above ground, and governments are starting to spend billions on underground facilities intended to survive tens of thousands and hopefully hundreds of thousands of years.

That means there is an emerging interest in choosing the right signs and language to warn people of a stockpile that could be deadly, as well as a source of military nuclear proliferation - or even a source of fuel, if future technology can recycle it. Languages evolve fast - the English of the 11th century bears scant resemblance to the English of the 21st - and places of human settlement also come and go, shaped by war, climate change and other forces.

Words not only change, they also die out. Today’s dead languages include those that, in their halcyon days, belonged to the world’s most advanced civilizations. It took decades to unlock the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphs only a few thousand years old, and Mayan symbols of even more recent vintage remain a mystery to this day. So, for humans many generations hence, the major languages, customs and symbols of today may be indecipherable, even though the threat from casks of plutonium – or
caesium-tainted waste will still be lethal.

Simply installing a red-lettered sign warning our descendants to steer clear of a deep chamber will not be enough. To those in the future, it might be taken as meaning: "Hey! Dig here! Treasure below!"

Tom Peake of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says the search for a solution encompasses many areas, including semiotics (the study of signs), linguistics, history and anthropology. "The need to address the disposal of nuclear waste and its long-term potential hazard has been the impetus for research into long-term memory," he explains.

In the US, researchers at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a nuclear waste dump for the military in the New Mexico desert, envisage crafting gigantic blocks of stone engraved with symbols designed to last for thousands of years.

These will be supported by "information in multiple languages in multiple media" to try to convey the potential danger, said Peake. In Europe, though, a strong current of thinking is that future waste sites should somehow be integrated into human society so that the warnings are transmitted from generation to generation.

The great anticlimax!

Vatsyayana would be a very unhappy man if he glanced through the Durex survey 2008. The urban Indian is so caught up with life that there’s little action happening between the sheets. Hectic stressed-out lifestyles are getting in the way of libido and liaisons.

A global survey conducted by the leading condom manufacturer, Durex, reveals that 46 per cent Indians experience an orgasm during every encounter against 24 per cent of Chinese and 27 per cent of Japanese. Italians, Spaniards and Mexicans have best sex lives with 66 per cent of them reaching the peak, the survey, which polled 26,000 people in 26 countries.

Women get a worse deal; only 32 per cent say they reached the peak every time they have sex, compared with 63 per cent of men. But not everyone is going through a routine of pleasure denial. Usha, a 26-year-old professional says, "I lost my virginity to my husband on the marriage night. I was very naïve but my husband was very understanding. Today we share a very healthy sexual relationship. My husband is very sensitive to my sexual needs. We spend a lot of time in foreplay and I enjoy his playfulness."

However, that’s not always the story as many Indian women go through the motions of faking it if only to keep their partners happy." Women do not understand that they can be in control of their own pleasure. They believe that the man is the one having his fun. Once women understand their own sexuality it will boost their satisfaction factor," explains Ian Faria, a marriage counsellor.

Jamal Shaikh, editor Men’s Health magazine says, "In India most men have their first sexual encounter at the age of 25 or even later, with a girl who is his wife. So they may come across as shy. For most Indian women, a man who’s not completely sure of himself is a turn off. This reduces the level of satisfaction for the man and the woman."

Globally, a third of people do it once a week while Greeks are really at it with all their hot-blooded Mediterranean virility (87 per cent) and Brazilians close behind (82 per cent), around 68 per cent of Indians have sex once a week.

Are Indians, then holding their urges back and keeping hormones on a leash? "Although India is the land of the Kama Sutra, there has been a lot of negative ideas doing the rounds about sex. Women believe that they have to oblige their husbands in bed -- sex is the price for marriage and for men marriage is the price for sex. This mindset is throwing the balance off," says Faria.

Sudha, 24, believes that sex comes naturally to people. "I am a virgin and I intend to lose my virginity to my husband. For me sex should be spontaneous and not be goal oriented. It should be love making and an orgasm in the mind."

Though the experiencing of pleasure has its origin in the mind, there is no denying that the mating game is also a very touch-feel skill involving hits, misses, erogenous zones and sensitive spots. These physical ramifications heighten the satisfaction of the ritual. Intellectualising it beyond a point might take way from that sense of fulfillment. Maybe we need to talk, express, open up, and experiment.

'School expenses rise by 160% in 8 years'

While politicians battle it out over inflation and the prices of onions and brinjals, the probable blow for the Indian middle class with its obsession for a ’good’ education are the rising school expenses. According to an ASSOCHAM survey, the costs of sending a child to school have risen by 160% in the last 8 years. What’s more, this figure is exclusive of the tuition fees hiked every now and then.

The survey, done under the aegis of the Social Development Foundation of ASSOCHAM on ’Rising school expenses vis-a-vis dilemma of young parents’ says annual school expenses for a single child excluding tuition fees have risen from Rs 25,000 in 2000 to Rs 65,000 in 2008 while the average annual income of fairly well-off parents has not risen by more than 30% in the same period. The average tuition fees for a private school is Rs 35,000 per year, with Rs 30,000-35,000 per year as expense for a host of ’overheads’. An estimated 3 crore children in the country study in private schools, says the survey.

The 2,000 working parents across were surveyed across nine cities—Delhi, Mumbai, Lucknow, Dehradun, Pune, Bangalore, Kolkata, Chennai and Chandigarh—during April and May this year. One in 10 respondents said the cost of schooling did affect the choice of school. These were parents of young enough kids who had the option of changing schools. Sixty-five per cent respondents said more than half of their salary was spent on their children’s education while 50% conceded schooling was actually a ’strain’ on the family budget.

Nearly 60% of parents felt education had become a business and that the high tuition fees did not actually indicate the academic standards of a school. Rather, it indicated a demand-supply function so that school managements could effect erratic fee hikes every year—something parents can not protest. Even private preparatory schools charge Rs 25,000 a term, the survey says.

Said a parent with two children studying in a very reputed chain of schools, ’Every year there is a hike. Every few days there is something or the other in school for which I have to cough up more money.’

Transport has emerged as one of the most expensive components of a child’s schooling with an average annual cost of Rs 12,000 per child. Packed lunches cost Rs 9,600 per year per child and shoes cost Rs 4,000-5,000 per year per child.

Said Rakhi Sengupta, whose daughter studies in a reputed private school in south Delhi, ’It’s all a racket but we can do nothing about it.’ This ’brand consciousness" too finds a mention in the survey.

Sensex's returns to be less than 10%?

The Bombay Stock Exchange’s benchmark Sensex may have registered its biggest ever monthly fall in the last 16 years when it sank to a 15-month low of 13,405.54 points on Monday, but the worst is still not over if a survey of fund managers is to be believed.

The country’s key stock index could provide a return of less than 10 per cent over the next 12 months, brokerage firm CLSA said on Monday, citing a majority of fund managers in a poll. The Sensex has already dropped 33 per cent this calendar year, its worst six months since the benchmark was introduced in 1979.

In fact, according to 31 per cent of the participants in the poll, a further downside in the benchmark index can be expected as rising commodity prices and higher interest rates hurt growth in Asia’s third largest economy.

“India-dedicated funds and mid-sized funds are relatively bearish,” CLSA said, adding that 57 per cent of non-India dedicated funds were underweight on the Indian market.

NO END TO BAD NEWS...

The survey could not have come at a more inopportune time as investor sentiments had already been dampened by high inflation and a resurgence in global crude oil prices which again surged to over $142 in Asian trade.

Even during Monday’s trade session, fund houses and investors off-loaded holdings in refinery, bank and realty segments following projections of a fall in economic growth.

Germany-based Dresdner Bank said that the soaring inflation and high interest rates are expected to take a toll on the Indian economy, bringing down its GDP growth rate to 7.5 per cent this financial year as against the 9 per cent clocked in 2007-08 .

Dresdner Bank, the banking arm of global insurance major Allianz Group, also observed that the Indian economy had already lost momentum this year with production growth slowing substantially in the first four months of 2008.

This projection is much lower than the Finance Ministry’s expectations of 8-8 .5 per cent GDP growth, and is the second major one since research firm Standard and Poor’s slashed its forecast to 7.8 per cent last Thursday.

SENSEX DROPS BY 340 PTS

The downgrading of GDP growth forecasts, coupled with global oil rates heading northwards again, hit the BSE’s bellwether hard, pulling it down by another significant 340.62 points to register its biggest ever monthly fall in the last 16 years.The 30-share Sensex settled the day at 13,405.54, showing a loss of 2.47 per cent, from its previous close. Similarly, the NSE’s 50-share S&P CNX Nifty fell by 96.10 points, or 2.32 per cent, to close at 4,040.55.

Traders said that the ongoing political uncertainty at the Centre had a sentimental impact on markets too. The Left supporters of UPA Government had threatened to withdraw support if Prime Minister Manmohan Singh pushed ahead with the Indo-Us Nuclear Deal.

“The only segment that is showing some resilience is the services sector, which is still recording double-digit growth rates,” Allianz-Dresdner Economic Research said in its report on the economy and markets. AGENCIES

MANIC MONDAY

DOWN 340.62 PTS AT 13,405.54 CLOSING LEVEL IS A 15-MONTH LOW JUNE ’08 ENDS AS BIGGEST LOSING MONTH IN 16 YEARS

World's longest cable-stayed bridge opens in China

The world’s longest cable-stayed bridge has officially opened in eastern China, linking the two banks of the Yangtze river, state media reported Tuesday.

The Sutong bridge, which spans 1,088 metres (3,570 feet) over China’s longest waterway and links the cities of Suzhou and Nantong, officially opened with a ceremony Monday after a month-long trial, the Shanghai Daily reported.

The six-lane bridge is expected to boost economic growth in the region and cut the travel time between Shanghai and Nantong to one hour from the previous four hours, the report said.

Up to 30,000 vehicles a day crossed the bridge during the trial, the Xinhua news agency reported.

"With the bridge, it takes just seven minutes to drive across the Yangtze," the agency quoted Jiangsu province’s transportation director, You Qingzhong, as saying.

The 1.15-billion-dollar bridge, which overtakes Japan’s 890-metre (2,900-foot) Tatara Bridge as the longest of its kind, is a feat of modern Chinese engineering, the project’s chief engineer Wu Shouchang said.

"The bridge is a good demonstration of China’s scientific achievements in bridge construction over the past years," Xinhua quoted Wu as saying.

The bridge, 108 kilometers (67 miles) upstream from the mouth of the Yangtze River, joins the national highway network on both banks, Xinhua said.

The bridge is supported by soaring steel and concrete towers that stand 300 meters tall.