Five must-read stories—December 10  

Would printing notes at foreign presses have helped RBI overcome the demonetisation debacle?

Why didn’t the government or the Reserve Bank of India consider printing the new ₹500 and ₹2,000 notes at foreign printing presses as a means of overcoming the current shortage of new notes? According to The Wire, a six-year push towards greater indigenisation, initial misplanning and a handful of past, controversial outsourcing incidents may have put off the RBI.

The foreign printing presses apparently have a decent record on meeting deadlines. UK's De La Rue apparently organised the “complex operation to replace Iraq’s old currency in 2003-4” and delivered the notes just ten weeks after the order was placed. De La Rue—a printing company that not only printed currency notes for India back in 1998 but also continued to supply a majority of the RBI’s banknote paper requirement until 2011—has soured relations with India now. However, there are other European and American companies that could have supplied the printing concerns.

Anandabazar Patrika Group to retrench 40% of its staff

The ABP Group, which publishes two of eastern India’s most popular newspapers—the Bengali daily Anandabazar Patrika and the English newspaper The Telegraph—is all set to resort to retrench jobs of both journalists and non-journalists. According to The Quint, the downsizing of its workforce, by as much as 40%, will begin with immediate effect. The ABP Group is said to have engaged a US company, Hey Consultancy Ltd, which observed that the group has at least 47.5% surplus workers.

Blaming demonetisation for being unable to pay wages, tea garden managers flee

Fearing that the managers would be assaulted since wages of workers had been delayed, the management of a tea garden in the Terai decided to flee citing insecurity after wages were delayed "due to the demonetisation effects". The Telegraph reports that senior officers of Tirrihannah tea estate, located around 35 km from Siliguri, left the garden around midnight on Thursday after sending a general notice to the Indian Tea Association and the Darjeeling administration. The garden has 1,200 permanent and 1,300 casual workers.

How two Chennai hospitals, Apollo and Multi Super Speciality Hospital, illustrate strengths and weaknesses of TN’s politics

Apollo Hospital was started in Chennai in 1983, and the Economic Times points out that historically it appears that the AIADMK is associated closer to it. The foundation stone for the Tamil Nadu Government Multi Super Speciality Hospital was laid by the DMK government in 2008. But under the rules of the competing political personality cults of Jayalalithaa and Karunanidhi the leading projects sanctioned by each, when in power, were to be repudiated when, in the electoral seesaw of the state’s politics, the other came to power.

With impending state polls, Akhilesh Yadav wants a TV news channel for Uttar Pradesh

On the eve of the Uttar Pradesh polls, the Indian Express reports that the Akhilesh Yadav government is planning to raise a strategic demand during a meeting of information ministers to be hosted by the Union Information and Broadcasting Ministry in New Delhi Saturday—allow the state to start a TV news channel. While Akhilesh is in charge of the information department in UP, he has authorised his Minister for Trade Tax, Yasar Shah, to represent him at the meeting that is being convened after nearly 10 years.