Afternoon:
14°c
Two years back you only had to hit Marine Drive, Mumbai's seaside esplanade, to sense the stock market madness. Every hundred metres you'd whizz past a giant billboard advertising this or that company's flotation. Elsewhere, broking firms were opening up in the unlikeliest concrete shacks, stock quotes streaming in LCD lights above them. The mood was like Wall Street in the roaring Twenties.
Last week, after an 18-month hiatus, the billboards were back. Adani Power today launches the second-biggest initial public offering in India's stock market history, and it has chosen the plum spot on Marine Drive to advertise it.
Bombay's Sensex index has rebounded nearly 90% since March. Capital markets are roaring back into life and it's not just domestic markets which are opening up either. Two weeks ago London-based Indian billionaire Anil Aggarwal pulled off the first Indian overseas equity issue in more than a year, raising $1.5 billion(£900 million) for Sterlite Power in New York. Already wind-turbine manufacturer Tata Steel has listed in London, and Suzlon and Tata Power have raised money in Luxembourg. Tata Motors looks bound to follow shortly.
Back home, ordinary Indians are regaining their taste for a punt. Last week I met an accountant, hoping he'd do my taxes but instead he tried to flog me a stock scheme which, he maintained, would guarantee an 18% return. All I had to do was provide him with a substantial loan and leave him to what he rather alarmingly called his “financial jugglery”.
* I motored through the whole of Wednesday night last week to catch the full solar eclipse in nearby Surat. Four hours in, the car crashed to a halt as we dropped into a pothole deeper than any I'd seen. This was on a toll-road — part of the “Golden Quadrilateral”, ostensibly the Indian government's greatest achievement in the field of infrastructure this decade. Forget building new infrastructure, the little which India's government has managed to provide so far is falling apart.
* Air India, the troubled national airline, went to the government on Saturday to beg for the cash needed to stave off financial disaster. It also presented a restructuring plan. The airline's fundamental problem has long been diagnosed as government interference. I've heard stories, I don't know how true, of ministers demanding flights be delayed so they can catch them. But when I asked a senior civil servant whether the plan suggested more independence, he just chuckled. “Oh no,” he said. “Nothing like that. There were no radical suggestions. You won't hear that at this level.”
