The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Oriental Bank donates Rs. 30 lakh to MSE

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Friday, Mar 02, 2007
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Oriental Bank donates Rs. 30 lakh to MSE

Staff Reporter

To provide infrastructure support to M.Sc. course in Financial Economics

CHENNAI: The Oriental Bank of Commerce has donated Rs. 30 lakh to the Madras School of Economics (MSE) for providing infrastructure support to the institute's new M.Sc. course in Financial Economics.

Accepting the cheque from bank chairman and managing director K.N. Prithviraj at a function held on Thursday, MSE chairman emeritus Raja J. Chelliah said the gift was in appreciation of the institute's role in promoting a sound understanding of economics and its centrality to public policy. He felt politics often pushed economics out in the discussion of policy decisions. "Take the Railways, for example. If you subsidise in the name of `aam aadmi,' you will not satisfy. The more you subsidise, the more people will demand. The more you cross-subsidise by taxing freight rates, the more you hike the cost of production. These are things that need to be discussed; these are things that are never found in any budget speech. Whether it be Lalu Prasad or Nitish Kumar, there's no difference on this," Dr. Chelliah said.

Mr. Prithviraj said good economists were needed to help the Indian banking sector face the challenge of adapting and repositioning itself in a globalised scenario. Some of the issues facing Indian banks were the need for consolidation, capitalisation of assets, structural reforms to free public sector banks from rigid government controls, common IT platforms and the dearth of young talent.

School director D.K. Srivastava said the money would be used to develop additional library and computing facilities for the new course, which trains students in financial services. While the initial batch has 15 students, the next will have 30. "This is the second phase of MSE's development... The next step would be a course in actuarial economics for the insurance sector that has immense growth potential," he said. While a one-year postgraduate diploma programme was likely to start this year, the postgraduate degree programme would begin in 2008.

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