Media speculations

ON THE SIDELINES

"When the Central Bank governor says good morning, the media starts speculating whether it would mean a different scenario in the evening".

This is what RBI Governor Y V Reddy said while addressing a seminar at the ADB annual meeting here on Wednesday. He then started reading out from a prepared text.

Oil obsession

The media covering the ADB meeting seemed to be obsessed with rising oil prices. Whether it was the RBI governor or Finance Minister P Chidambaram or the ADB president, the question that invariably cropped up was what would be the impact of the steep rise in oil prices.

Corruption everywhere

At the end of a meeting of the representatives of non-governmental organisations and civil societies, one of the delegates complained that there was a lot of corruption in ADB funding and the bank had appointed very few people to check corruption compared to the World Bank.

The ADB president answered this by saying that the World Bank had more than 10,000 employees and hence had more than 60 anti-corruption officers.

On the other hand, the ADB has around 2,300 employees so it has six to seven people to check corruption. ADB has an auditor-general to look into the aspect.

Not yet ready

Novotel Hotel, adjacent to the Hyderabad International Convention Centre (HICC), had been conceived especially to accommodate the delegates of the conferences being held at HICC, more so, for accommodating the participants of the ADB meeting.

However, by Wednesday, only 125 of the proposed 265 rooms of the hotel were ready for occupation.

Bowl of coal

Village leaders from three communities in Thailand presented a bowl of coal to the ADB president to protest against the bank's continued financing of the Mae Moh coal mine and BCLP coal plant.

Right to demonstrate

Representatives of the non-governmental organisations and civil societies, who are opposing the activities of ADB, had free access to the venue of the bank's annual meeting here. No doubt the ADB president feels that "in a democracy, everyone has a right to demonstrate in an orderly manner".