Archives: Volume 1 • Number 6 • February-March 2008

Gold Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) - A Bullish Investment Option

Gone are the days when jewelers had the monopoly of selling the yellow metal. A few years ago, banks jumped on to the gold bandwagon too and started offering gold coins to their customers. Now there is a new innovation- Gold Exchange Traded Funds (ETF), which allows investors to hold the precious metal in paper form, just like a share or bond certificate. Gold Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) are the latest financial instrument to hit the market. And in a gold crazy country like India, it sure has the potential to emerge as a popular investment product. Gold Exchange Traded Funds may open new vistas for the mutual fund industry. Mutual funds like Benchmark MF and UTI offer gold ETFs to their customers. Gold ETFs are nothing but MF units that are traded on the exchange just like a listed share of a company. During market trading hours, investors can submit ‘buy’ or ‘sell’ orders, which are executed by the market. If investors require cash, they can redeem their ETF units, though they have to incur some cost for redemption.

Dr. C.V. Ranjani
Assistant Professor
Department of Commerce
University College for Women
Koti,Hyderabad
ranjanianand@yahoo.co.in

“Microfinance in India: A State of the Sector Report, 2006”, a report prepared by Prabhu Ghate and published by Microfinance India and jointly sponsored by Care, Ford Foundation and Swiss Agency for Development & Cooperation, says that ‘microfinance in India has emerged as a powerful tool for financial inclusion, reaching out to a fifth of all poor households who have yet to be reached by the formal financial sector. The larger of the two main models, the self-help group bank linkage programme (SBLP) covered about 143 million poor households in March 2006 and provided indirect access to the banking system to another 14 million. The other, microfinance institution (MFI) model, served 7.3 million households, of which 3.2 million were poor.’ Apart from the scorching pace of growth, the report highlights several trends in Indian microfinance. First and, perhaps, most important, the rapid spread of microfinance has provided competition to rural money lenders. “ICICI Bank has catalyzed the creation of over 100 microfinance partners and has been able to extend micro-loans from 20000 clients in 2003 to 3 million clients by March, 2006. Microfinance will emerge as an important development tool that will enable the financial inclusion of rural and urban poor.

Dr.Devendra Prasad Pandey
Senior Lecturer
Faculty of Rural Development and Business Management,Mahatama Gandhi Chitrakoot Gramodata Vishwavidyalaya,Chitrakoot
Madhya Pradesh 

Financial Control and Management of Police Services - A Case Study of Punjab State

Money is the bloodstream of administration and it is required for running all the activities of Government. Each officer who has some responsibility for conducting Government activities has to exercise financial control. In departments like the police, where receipts are negligible, control over expenditure is important and financial control largely means control over expenditure. Police department bears the responsibility for maintenance of peace, which is a pre-condition for sustained economic development. Internal disturbances and high crime rates prove detrimental to the economic health of a nation. In the present times, the nations facing such problems are incurring huge public expenditure on maintaining defence and internal security. The present study is an attempt to have an overview of the main components of financial administration of police department and to analyze the financial issues before the police services in Punjab. Further an attempt has been made to examine the variations in the nature and quantum of total police expenditure in Punjab during different phases of crime from 1984 to 2004.
Total police expenditure at constant prices in Punjab (which is considered amongst the group of states maintaining very high police expenditure) has increased by 4.9 times during the period of twenty years (1984-2004) at an average annual C.G.R. of 8.50%. The C.G.R. of terrorism period (1984-1994) was high to the extent of 16.49% as compared to C.G.R. of post terrorism period (1994-2004) which was estimated as 5.55%.

Dr.H.S.Sidhu
Professor
Punjab School of Economics
G.N.D. University, Amritsar
Punjab

S.S.Bains
Sr.Lecturer
P.G.Department of Economics
Lyallpur Khalsa College,Jalandhar
Punjab

How Balanced is the Performance Measurement Through the Balanced Score Card

In the global knowledge economy, creation, sustenance and application of knowledge has become the key differentiator of success. Traditionally effective management of physical and financial management is considered an important source of competitive edge. Today many companies have realized that management of knowledge and the knowledge workers is a key differentiator of competitive strength

An important fall out of this thinking is rapid changes in the way the performance of an organization and its people is measured. There has been growing criticism of financial measures in performance evaluation system and varieties of new measures were floated in the last two decades. Balanced Score Card is an important one among them

Balanced Score Card is a set of measures that gives top managers a fast yet comprehensive view of the business. It pulls together all the important elements of even a company's competitive agenda. Through this, the top management understands the internal trade offs better-whether the value addition in one area is achieved at the cost of another-what we call “Cannibalizing Effect”

Paradoxically the major limitation of the Balanced Score Card is that it promotes multiple objectives of equal weight, which may create decision making in congruencies. Despite the criticism, the Balanced Score Card continues to be an important tool of performance measurement all over the globe barring it’s, the difficulty in balancing the different perspectives of an organization.Use of Balanced Score Card as tool of linking strategy with operations and translating vision into actions is yet to be empirically established.

Lokanandha Reddy Irala
Associate Professor
Dhruva College of Management
Hyderabad
reddyirala@gmail.com

Dr.Raghunatha Reddy
Associate Professor
School of Management Studies
JNT University,Hyderabad
drreddy5@yahoo.com

Dr.S.Pratap Reddy
Chairman
Dhruva College of Management
Hyderabad
drspratapreddy@yahoo.co.in

New Issue Market in India:An Analysis of Growth Trends,Recent Development and Evaluation of Primary Issues

During current decade there has been remarkable reforms in the India Economic scenario. Consequently NIM has made enormous progress in recent years, moving away from fixed- price offering to price discovery through a screen-based auction for IPOs. This has reflected a quest to discover the price through an open fair, competitive auction, which is done in a fully transparent way, where all investors participate in an equal setting, and the investment bankers’ or other influences do not vitiate the allocation of shares. The increase in fund mobilization from NIM in India has been exceptionally well. The rise in fund mobilized from Rs. 14042 crore in 1991-92 to Rs. 114577 crore is not a small achievement from any standard. Though some time unfair trade practices, IPO scam and political and economic instability has deteriorated the faith of retail investor in primary market. Now they need strong IPO analysis before investing their hard earned money. This paper is an effort to critically study the growth trends of NIM in India : category wise and ownership wise. Paper also insight the impact of IPO scam on the growth of NIM, recent effort of market regulator (SEBI) to make NIM efficient and transparent and throw light on the appropriate way to evaluating the primary issues.

Dr.G.S.Rathore
Reader & Dean
Department of Commerce
Uday  Pratap Autonomous College
Varanasi,Uttar Pradesh
dr.gsrathoreupc@gmail.com

Shyam Lal Dev Pandey
Lecturer
School of Management Sciences
Varanasi
Uttar Pradesh
shyamlaldev@gmail.com