Rate hike gets good billing

REGIONAL ROUNDUP

The surest sign of the rise of the Great Indian Middle Class has been the coverage of the RBI's latest interest rate hike in the regional press. A few years ago, few non-English language papers would publish the news on the front page. At the most it would merit a brief, with the details on the business page. This time around, however, a large number of papers carried the development on page one.

In the north, papers like Rajasthan Patrika and Dainik Bhaskar had it as the day's lead with a box on the impact. While Patrika gave the details of the current and new interest rates charged on home loans by differnt banks, Bhaskar explained which loans would cost more. Punjab Kesri had it as the day's third lead on the front page "" the day's lead was another economic story, on the Central government returning Balco's Rs 1,099-crore cheque as it was no longer interested in selling its post-privatisation residual stake in the company to Sterlite.

In Tamil Nadu, Dinamalar carried a four-column report with RBI Governor Y V Reddy's photograph; the daily also had another report on the collapse of the Doha Development Round, saying that the US was responsible for the Doha failure. The daily also carried a four column report with Commerce Minister Kamal Nath's photograph on the Doha failure, on the business page, the previous day.

In Andhra Pradesh, the Telugu press gave extensive coverage to the RBI hiking the rates. All the leading Telugu newspapers "" Eenadu, Vaartha and Andhra Jyothi "" carried a single-column on their front pages and dedicated almost half a page each on their business pages to comprehensive reports on the RBI rate hike and other related news, besides carrying interviews and opinions of economic experts on the issue on Wednesday. While Andhra Jyothi, on its business page, carried a report on bank loan rates "Housing loans would be costlier", Eenadu gave a headline "Can't construct a house...can't buy a car" for the same. Both the newspapers, on their business pages, ran a column by IDBI Director K Narasimha Murthy on the RBI rate hike. "Increasing the reverse repo rates is not an extraordinary move. Even the American Federal Bank, Japan Bank and the ECB have raise the reverse repo rates. The RBI also took this step to check inflation," Murthy said. He expressed apprehensions that the increase in interest rates would result in the inflation shooting up, and said that it would be interesting to see what steps the RBI would take at that time.

The newspapers, however, gave below-average coverage to the failure of WTO talks, on Tuesday. All the three dailies restricted the news to single columns and relegated it to their inside pages "" Andhra Jyothi on its second page, and Eenadu and Vaartha on their business pages.