Management: Agriculture Marketing

Management: Agriculture Marketing: India’s Pulse Rate Year 2015 has not been the only year in which availability of pulses in Indian market has been short of its dem...

Management: Smart Living

Management: Smart Living: Smart Living through Financial Innovations – An overview Innovation is the order of the day now. Come any sphere of life and there are...

Smart Living

Smart Living through Financial Innovations – An overview

Innovation is the order of the day now. Come any sphere of life and there are found end number of innovations invading it. And it is rightly so as the homosapiens are the most creative of all creatures in the universe. Every innovation has led to efficiency and effectiveness in operations and convenience and ease in life and its activities. Necessity is said to be mother of all inventions. Therefore every innovation has in its root one or the other need of the hour. During the last little over two decades i.e. end 20^th century and beginning of 21^st century has unleashed a number of scams most of which have been related to financial transactions. These scams gripped the society like anything and crippled the life badly. Hence it may not be an exaggeration to infer that financial innovations kicked off 21^st century to arrest many devils of the society and to cause smart living of its people and enterprises.

Discrepancies bound life:

Human civilization commenced trade through barter system where goods used to be exchanged physically with each other. However with growth in civilization it was found difficult and inconvenient to continue the barter system and people thought of inventing some common means of transaction. Thus came the currencies which facilitated trade and commerce anytime and anywhere. People started exchanging their goods with currencies and at a later point, even currencies with currencies as in case of loans etc. This physical form of exchange led to scope of discrepancies in the financial transaction including the most prominent under the table dealings. This is how came the concept of greasing the palms of the power-that-be. This led to large scale corruption in the society.

Financial innovations:

If the transaction in physical form of currencies created all the discrepancies then the only answer of it was to shift to virtual transaction. This is what exactly followed the philosophy behind all financial innovations. These innovations saw to it that no physical form of currency including bank draft, cheques etc. was involved in any financial transaction thus curtailing the scope of discrepancies. Table no. – 1 given below provides an indicative (and not exhaustive) list of some such innovative financial tools of the present century that led to virtual financial transactions without physically involving the currencies. People get seduced by the eye-catching simplicity, undeniable usefulness, or fun gamification elements of these innovations. May it be different types of cards like debit / credit / ATM / CDM cards or different mechanisms executing financial transactions like internet / online banking / shopping / booking or mobile banking, swapping machine etc.  The amount thus gets transferred from one hand to another hand without physically being in currency form and these transactions are backed by proper evidences that remain for ever for tracing / verifying these transactions, the amounts and the parties involved and in many case(s) the cause(s) of transactions as well. Digitization of securities is in lieu of that. However, this approach too has not been absolutely free from discrepancies as the Satyamdotcom scam case indicates but yet it has brought about transparencies to a great extent.

Table No. – 1: Showing Innovative Financial Tools

S. No.	Innovative Financial Tools	S. No.	Innovative Financial Tools
1.	Plastic Money	12.	Cash Deposit Machine (CDM)
2.	Debit Card	13.	Online Shopping of goods and services
3.	Credit Card	14.	Online Booking of tickets
4.	Automated Teller Machine (ATM)	15.	Self-Help Group (SHG)
5.	Micro Automated Teller Machine  (Micro-ATM)	16.	Micro Finance
6.	Internet / Online Banking	17.	Payment Banks
7.	Mobile Banking	18.	Securities Digitization
8.	Account Transfer through National Electronic Fund Transfer (NEFT)	19.	Smart Cards
9.	Account Transfer through  Real-time Gross Settlement (RTGS)	20.	Apps
10.	Swapping Machine	21.	Mobile wallet
11.	Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT)	22.	Instant Mobile

Payment banks:

One of the issues involved in virtual transaction is the confidentiality of pin number. There has been number of cases reported about cheating and frauds in pin number uses creating concern about safety of financial transaction. Another innovative financial tool has been now in place in form of payment banking that adequately addresses the issue of pin number safety. Payments banks are niche banks set up by the Reserve Bank of India to further the agenda of financial inclusion. With payments banks, the vast segment of customers who have no access to such products will be able to get the advantage of the digital channels and digital technology for regular banking services. The current generic payment applications may not be suitable for all customer segments. With a payments bank account, one may be able to do it through one’s phone which need not even be a smart phone. The use of technology will be critical for payments banks to attract customers. 

Today if one has to transfer money to someone via net banking, one has to first add the person as a beneficiary, with details like bank account number, bank's IFSC code, among other details. With payments banks, one may be able to do this without going through the hassle of adding people, authenticating it through passwords and so on.

While some universal banks have also introduced innovations such as fund transfer through social media like Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp, these have so far not reached the mass audience.

Conclusions:

21^st century has therefore been the century of innovations. And amongst these innovations, financial innovations are leading the lives and activities on this globe, ofcourse, with active support of technological innovations. This paper has presented a snapshot of so far financial innovations but many more are to come in the times ahead and all of these are causing smart living of the people on this earth. However, with every innovation there needs to be created a matching awareness amongst its users as they are the ones who are either the beneficiaries or the victims of these innovations. In this context the role of the government – the regulator of all these financial innovations – becomes very significant as these innovations bring complexities, challenges, risk and novelties apart from ease in dealing with finance.

Agriculture Marketing

India’s Pulse Rate

Year 2015 has not been the only year in which availability of pulses in Indian market has been short of its demand. The total pulse’s production in the country has always been short of its total demand by 12 to 14%. This demand has been met through imports of pulses. There has not been unprecedented rise in demand of pulses in the country in the current year to justify its price rise this year by 100% to 150% to around Rs. 200/- per Kg. On the contrary the production of Pulses in the country has substantially risen during the last few years. There has also not been any change in the exim policy affecting pulses import and yet if the common man’s plate is devoid of pulses it is astonishing. It calls for an analysis of the situation. After all how minimum has been the government (regulation / control) today that maximum has been the governance (its impact in terms of biting pulse rate).

One most common pointer that generally appears in the Indian market is the role (rather undue role) of stockiest effecting restrictive trade practices. Recent raids on them evidence this pointer. The second pointer could be lack of timely and adequate import of pulses to make up the shortfall of supply in the market and pulses importers’ recent proposition to government for a permission to stock more quantity of pulses goes in support of this pointer. The third pointer is the availability of substitute pulses like in the past Mother Dairy (in form of sale of Matar Dal) had done and in the present some private traders have now started doing in form of “Moth Dal” but by then the situation has already worsened. One final pointer appears, to me, is the presence of a complex gamut of middlemen, not just middlemen but a complex gamut of middlemen in the pulses trades and their internal permutation and combination such as those of wholesalers, retailers, importers, stockiest, government officials, politicians (not to be kept away from this whole episode of pulses) etc. It is a known fact that presence of middlemen in agriculture sector has been lethal for the farmers and the consumers. The dairying in India has shown how to fight with them and eradicate their presence from milk business through PMPCS – Primary Milk Producers’ Cooperative Societies. India is therefore rightly today the largest milk producing nation of the world. Kudos to dairy farmers. We need to do some sort of similar thing to say Kudos to Pulses growing farmers.

Let’s rethink and renovate.

Prof. H. M. Jha “Bidyarthi”. Shegaon (Maharashtra)

`Development Sustainablity’ means ‘Development Equity’

According to “Brundtland Report” by World Commission for Environment and Development 1987

Sustainable Development is the development that meets the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

Let us examine this definition first from the Present to Future Concept of Sustainability and Development. There are three categories of population – i) The Impacting Population ii) The Impacted Population and iii) The Common Population. The Development Sustainability from Impacting Population Perspectives relates to a very small population who may be called as elites and who brought about outstanding developments for the humanity such as astronaut Rakesh Sharma etc. The Development Sustainability from Impacted Population Perspectives relates to a comparatively larger population than the first category of population who have been beneficiaries of the developments by the former. But the Development Sustainability from Common Population Perspectives relates to the largest population who are the victims of the so called development and hence not sustainable development. This population remains devoid of sweetness of development fruits and happens to be the Victims of sourness of development fruits – natural calamities like floods, tsunami, cyclone, drought, famine, wars etc. -  and hence Lopsided development that forces us to opine - Is this the world to live in?

Let us now look at the same definition from the other way round i.e. Past to Present Concept of Sustainability and Development. We live in present the foundation of which was laid down in the past and this present is going to become past tomorrow. Should we therefore continue laying down the similar foundations as those by our forefathers? The answer is definitely a big “NO”. Hence need to think of Development Equity. There has been several MANAGEMENT PARADIGMS to cause equitable development conceived and (being or proposed to be) implemented by people in the present. Some of these are listed below:

-Deep ecology and not Frontier Economics

-Welfare economics of Prof. Amartya Sen

-Inclusive Growth of Dr. Man Mohan Singh

-Inclusive Finance of Shri P. Chitambaram

-Sabka Sath Sabka Vikas of Shri Narendra Modi

-Digital economy – Shreshtha Bharat

-Green economy & environmental sustainability – Swaccha Bharat

-Economic sustainability - Swabhimani Bharat

-Social sustainability – by Bandhan & Shri Satyarthy

-Doom and gloom of global commons

-Eco-development and political economy

And hence finally Participatory development – equity – which translates the Vedic rhymes Vasudhaiv kutumbkam for the entire humanity.

Prof. H. M. Jha "Bidyarthi", Shegaon