The Indian Economy - Page 38

First Previous

Page

Frequent Posters

jagdu

@jagdu

IF-Dazzler

Posted: 14 years ago

Rahul Dravid and captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni hit centuries as India came back hard on Sri Lanka in the first cricket test to rack up 385-6.

India's Rahul Dravid gestures after scoring a century during first day of the first cricket test match between India and Sri Lanka, in Ahmedabad

Dravid batted nearly the entire first day to finish at unbeaten 177, while Dhoni made a splendid 110 before he was out three overs before stumps. The elegant right-handed Dravid, also known as Wall for his temperament, completed 11,000 runs in test matches and hit 26 boundaries and a straight six in yet another 251-ball knock. It was a remarkable turnaround by Dravid and Dhoni after paceman Chanaka Welegedara's triple strike had left the home team reeling at 32-4 inside the first hour. Dravid featured in two productive partnerships which gave India an early initiative in the three-test series. He added 224 runs for the sixth wicket with Dhoni before Dhamika Prasad had the India skipper caught behind just before close. Dhoni hit 10 boundaries and a six in his first test century at home and faced 159 deliveries. Dravid first resurrected the innings with a 125-run stand with Yuvraj Singh (68), and then featured in a double-century stand with his captain. Earlier, Welegedara caused major concerns for the hosts with his opening burst of three wickets, including Sachin Tendulkar for four, after Dhoni won the toss and elected to bat. The 28-year-old swing bowler clean bowled Gautam Gambhir with the total at 14 and then had two wickets in the sixth over. He had Virender Sehwag (16) leg before wicket with a ball that pitched on middle stump and then bowled Tendulkar (4) between bat and pad. Tendulkar, celebrating his 20th anniversary in test cricket, lasted only three deliveries. Prasad had V.V. S. Laxman bowled without scoring in the seventh over to have India reeling at 32 for four. That brought Yuvraj and Dravid together and both batsmen attacked the Sri Lankan bowlers. The gamble paid off as they struck some delightful boundaries on both sides of the wicket in a powerful partnership and kept the scoring rate well over four runs an over. Muttiah Muralitharan finally broke the threatening stand when he lured Yuvraj with a slow flighted delivery and offered a tame catch to Tillakaratne Dilshan in the covers. Yuvraj hit 13 boundaries in his 93-ball innings before his concentration lapse. Dravid, ignored for the one-day series against Australia, pumped his fist in the air when he completed his 27th test century with a single off left-arm spinner Rangana Herath soon after tea. Dhoni raised his hundred when he came down the wicket to Herath's flighted delivery and drove past the fielder at covers for his ninth boundary of the innings. Welegedara, playing only his second test match and first in almost two years, was the pick of Sri Lankan bowlers with 3-75. India left out paceman Shanthakumaran Sreesanth and will rely on Zaheer Khan to lead the attack on his comeback from injury. Sri Lanka left spinner Ajantha Mendis out of its starting XI.

India plans to announce increased subsidies for solar-power generation, as the country looks to scale up production of renewable energy and show it is committed to mitigating climate change.

A New Delhi power plant; only a fraction of India's power comes from solar energy.

India's Ministry of New and Renewable Energy is expected to release details of the latest solar-power policy in the next several weeks. Dr. B. Bhargava, a director in the agency, said the plans will increase significantly the number of solar projects that can receive government support. The hope, Mr. Bhargava said, is that the new policy will encourage manufacturers of solar panels such as Moser Baer India Ltd. and Tata BP Solar India Ltd. to ramp up production, thereby reducing per-unit costs and driving down the high price of solar power. It is currently about five times more expensive to generate solar power than oil-based power. If the costs aren't reduced, this subsidy policy can't be sustained on a long-term basis, Mr. Bhargava said. India's revision of its solar policies comes ahead of a global climate-change conference at Copenhagen in December. The differences between developed and developing countries are part of the reason world leaders have lowered expectations for what's possible in Copenhagen, saying the purpose will be to set a political roadmap for further negotiations to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. Developing countries such as India are under pressure to show greater commitments to controlling greenhouse-gas emissions. Climate change will be among the issues on the agenda when Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visits the White House next week. India currently generates a tiny fraction of its power from solar energy. Coal accounts for more than half of the country's power capacity, and wind makes the biggest contribution among renewable sources, which together provide about 7.5% of India's energy.

Vendors used solar powered lights at an open air evening market in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad in September.

Solar power is promising, because sunlight is abundant everywhere, unlike wind and hydro power, which are better for only some regions. The government's new policy is aimed at increasing solar-power generation to 20,000 megawatts by 2020 from three megawatts. The potential is infinite with solar, Mr. Bhargava said. India's existing policy supports a modest amount of solar-power capacity 50 megawatts with subsidies of up to 25 cents per kilowatt hour. Mr. Bhargava said that program is already fully subscribed and will be expanded substantially through the new policy, though he declined to offer specifics. He said the new guidelines also will streamline the process for solar-power developers to collect subsidies and payments from state utilities. The major challenge for scaling up solar power has been providing the start-up capital to create demand. Many state electricity boards which purchase power from generating companies and sell it to consumers are in shaky financial positions. But Mr. Bhargava said the central government will take on most of the costs of the solar program in the early going. Initially, we'll have no choice but to do that for a few years, he said. Beyond expanding solar power, India has pledged in a national action plan on climate change to pursue a range of other measures, from increased fuel-efficiency in automobiles to more-efficient consumer appliances. The U.S. and other developed countries have sought to persuade India to accept mandatory curbs on greenhouse-gas emissions. Developing countries can't say this isn't my problem because most of the increase in carbon emissions in the future will be from developing countries, said U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, who was in India last week to meet with government officials. But India has resisted, arguing that its per-capita emissions are still well below those of developed countries. Indian officials and corporate executives say they don't want to put the brakes on economic growth and make it harder to provide electricity to 400 millions Indians who aren't on the national grid. Mr. Chu said India and the U.S. are exploring ways to combine efforts on basic research into new green technologies. He said India could be severely affected by receding glaciers and changing weather patterns if climate change isn't addressed urgently in coming years. He added that India will have no choice but to look beyond coal to alternative-energy sources as its population swells. India already faces a shortfall of power with capacity about 12% below demand during peak hours and demand is expected to increase five-fold by 2030, according to a recent McKinsey & Co. report.

A speeding train derailed in western India early Saturday, killing at least nine people and injuring more than 80. Fifteen cars of the New Delhi-bound train flew off the tracks and rolled onto their sides when the driver suddenly applied the brakes because of poor visibility in the region, said Vipin Kumar Pande, superintendent of police. A broken rail track punctured one car and killed some of the passengers, Pande told. Rescuers used machinery to cut open some of the cars to free trapped passengers, he said. Nineteen people were hospitalized with injuries, three of them in serious condition, Pande said, and more than 60 people with minor injuries had left for their homes after treatment. The accident occurred near Banshkov, a village nearly 25 miles south of Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan state. Accidents are common on India's sprawling rail network, one of the world's largest, with most blamed on poor maintenance. Last month, a passenger train crashed into another train's rear carriage in northern India, killing 22 people and injuring 16 near Agra, the home of the Taj Mahal.

Edited by jagdu - 14 years ago

Quote

jagdu

@jagdu

IF-Dazzler

Posted: 14 years ago

Lord's looks set to keep its name after the Marylebone Cricket Club denied a report Wednesday that naming rights to the sport's most famous ground would be sold as part of a 400 million ($673 million) redevelopment. Now the only question is how long the revamped venue will be able to host Test cricket. Fresh doubts have been raised over the future of the sport's five-day format following a report that shows Test matches are no longer bowling over the masses. Test cricket still draws huge crowds at Lord's the game's spiritual home but in its modern heartland it is a different story.

India's Gautam Gambhir, center, takes the catch of Sri Lanka's batsman Angelo Mathews, left, as Indian captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni looks on during third day of the first Test cricket between India and Sri Lanka in Ahmadabad, India, Nov. 18. IN2CRICKET hspace0 In India, whose 1.2 billion people are the most passionate fans on the planet, only 7% of cricket followers consider Test matches their preferred form of the game, according to new research by the MCC.

Fans in New Zealand and South Africa also registered dwindling enthusiasm for Test cricket in the survey, which polled cricket supporters in the three countries. John Stephenson, head of cricket at the MCC, warns that Test cricket is in danger of becoming an afterthought. Generally speaking Test cricket is robust in England, but in other parts of the world it's become very unpopular to go and watch," he says. People still watch it on TV but that's going to decline if no one's in the stadiums. And the knock-on effect of having empty stadiums is that the broadcasters start to lose value on their rights and that's a very serious situation for the future of Test cricket. Instead, the new-look Lord's can look forward to a steady diet of the dominant new form of the game. Twenty20, a fast-paced, thrill-a-minute version of the sport in which each team bowls 20 overs (sets of six balls) was originally devised to revive interest in the longer form of the game, yet its remarkable popularity particularly in India now appears to have doomed the traditional five-day format. If one form of cricket is more attractive than another, then what starts to happen is the revenue streams migrate to the more popular forms: fans buy tickets to the more exciting, popular forms, the TV coverage migrates, clearly the sponsors and corporate hospitality do that, says Simon Chadwick, professor of sports business strategy and marketing at Coventry University in the U.K. So ultimately what will happen is a new dominant form of cricket will emerge and I don't think that will necessarily be Test match cricket. Mr. Chadwick's views represent a doomsday scenario for the sport's traditionalists, who abhor this brash newcomer to the cricket scene, but recent TV deals suggest broadcasters have a similar opinion. While the sale of TV rights for the Indian Premier League, an all-star Twenty20 tournament launched in 2008, have generated more than $1 billion, the deal for other forms of the game in India fell to $425 million last month. And where India leads, the rest of the world follows, according to Stefan Szymanski, professor of Economics at Cass Business School in London. Most of the revenue now comes from the sub-continent and essentially India and they're not going to want to play Test matches very much anymore, he says. There's no interest in them. So we'll see a calendar that has a much higher representation of T20 than we see at the moment. As for what can Lord's expect when its makeover is finally complete in 2021? I think it's relatively simple cricket is going to become like baseball, says Mr. Szymanski. The days of David Gower and all those elegant players will probably go and you'll see testosterone-enhanced batsmen with bulging muscles smashing balls out of the ground. And the next generation will love it.