Retail all the way

REGIONAL ROUNDUP

also took this story as the business lead in its August 7 edition.

The dramatic arrest of Ashok Malhotra, the kingpin of the multi-crore land scam in Delhi, was the other main story of the week. A day after Malhotra surrendered at the Noida office of a news channel, nearly all newspapers took it as the lead story. Punjab Kesari's headline read "Scamster Malhotra arrested in dramatic denouement." Sonia Gandhi's meeting with the top brass of the Delhi government also found mention in the report.

Sania Mirza's unexpected victory against Martina Hingis in the EastWest Bank Classic was lauded in all Hindi papers, with a picture of a beaming Sania gracing the front pages on August 9.

The ECB decision, the sub-prime mess and the Bharti-Walmart agreement found little mention in any of the leading Kannada dailies as local issues dominated news coverage.

The two major river basins in the state "" Krishna and Cauvery "" are flooded due to excessive rains. All the major reservoirs are full and surplus water has flooded downstream villages and towns. More than 20 people have died in the floods. It has also caused extensive damage to property and crops. All the newspapers are concentrating on the issue with relief work going on at a snail's pace.

"It is unfortunate that the state government wakes up from its slumber every time there are floods. Just distributing monetary compensation is not sufficient. The government should initiate long-term measures to not only check floods, but harvest them for use through out the year," Praja Vani said in its editorial.

Other issues which made it to the front page of leading Kannada dailies Vijaya Karnataka, Kannada Prabha and Udaya Vani included the Prime Minister's one day visit to Bangalore to review infrastructure and agriculture.

Two Kannada filmmakers won national awards. Both of them "" Baragur Ramachandrappa and P Seshadri "" were featured extensively in the Kannada press.

Though the Telugu print media gave a miss to the ECB decision, it prominently covered the Bharti-Walmart agreement on their business pages. On Tuesday, frontline Telugu dailies Eenadu, Vaartha and Andhra Jyothi carried two-column stories on the signing of the agreement between Bharti Enterprises and Walmart for their cash-and-carry joint retail initiative in India, along with photographs of Rajan Bharti Mittal and Raj Jain shaking hands, as second leads on their business pages. Bharti entering into a pact with Google for providing web-based services to its customers was also featured on the business pages the same day.

On Tuesday, Eenadu carried an exclusive story "Dialing a golden future" as lead on its business page. Stating that around Rs 100,000 crore investments were planned for the Indian telecom sector in the next five years whic would open up opportunities to handset manufacturing companies, the daily said, "Keeping in view the increasing demand, the number of telecom towers too are expected to be increased to 3.5 lakh by 2010, from the present 1.25 lakh." Quoting a recent study, the daily said telecom handset sales touched Rs 77,170 crore last year, and were expected to grow 43 per cent during this year. "Nokia alone captured a market share of 54 per cent during 2006-07," it added.