Public Expenditure Accountability of the Indian Railways

The Indian Railways (IR) is one of the chief logistics agents of the Government of India (GOI). Considering the significant GOI funding into IR, public expenditure accountability (PEA) becomes an issue of importance. This paper looks into different aspects of the expenditure and financial management of IR. The paper is divided into three portions. The first portion looks at the railway-government interface. The main areas of focus here include a brief examination of The Indian Railways Act, the financial interface between the GOI and IR (consisting of budgetary support, market sourced financing and dividend payments), evaluating the need for a separate railway budget, political interference in the activities of IR and the interaction of IR with state governments. The second portion of the paper deals with the internal financial management of IR. In this section, there is an effort to evaluate the revenue generation by IR along with suggestions for enhancing its potential. This is followed by a look at the issue of subsidies to IR. Investment decisions of IR and the Special Railway Safety Fund (SRSF) along with the issue of excess manpower and cost reduction are other topics included in this section. The paper ends with a roadmap to corporatisation as a possible solution to the problems IR is faced with. The main areas dealt with are financial issues, pensions, the need for customer focus, the importance of focus on core competencies and a need to revamp IRs administrative structure and attitude.

Deviations from Tribimaximal Neutrino Mixing using a Model with Δ(27)\Delta(27) Symmetry

We present a model of neutrino mixing based on the flavour group $\Delta(27)$ in order to account for the observation of a non-zero reactor mixing angle ($\theta_{13}$). The model provides a common flavour structure for the charged-lepton and the neutrino sectors, giving their mass matrices a `circulant-plus-diagonal' form. Mass matrices of this form readily lead to mixing patterns with realistic deviations from tribimaximal mixing, including non-zero $\theta_{13}$. With the parameters constrained by existing measurements, our model predicts an inverted neutrino mass hierarchy. We obtain two distinct sets of solutions in which the atmospheric mixing angle lies in the first and the second octants. The first (second) octant solution predicts the lightest neutrino mass, $m_3 \sim 29~\text{meV}$ ($m_3 \sim 65~\text{meV}$) and the $CP$ phase, $\delta_{CP} \sim -\frac{\pi}{4}$ ($\delta_{CP} \sim \frac{\pi}{2}$), offering the possibility of large observable $CP$ violating effects in future experiments.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figure

Fully Constrained Majorana Neutrino Mass Matrices Using Σ(72×3)\Sigma(72\times 3)

In 2002, two neutrino mixing ansatze having trimaximally-mixed middle ($\nu_2$) columns, namely tri-chi-maximal mixing ($\text{T}\chi\text{M}$) and tri-phi-maximal mixing ($\text{T}\phi\text{M}$), were proposed. In 2012, it was shown that $\text{T}\chi\text{M}$ with $\chi=\pm \frac{\pi}{16}$ as well as $\text{T}\phi\text{M}$ with $\phi = \pm \frac{\pi}{16}$ leads to the solution, $\sin^2 \theta_{13} = \frac{2}{3} \sin^2 \frac{\pi}{16}$, consistent with the latest measurements of the reactor mixing angle, $\theta_{13}$. To obtain $\text{T}\chi\text{M}_{(\chi=\pm \frac{\pi}{16})}$ and $\text{T}\phi\text{M}_{(\phi=\pm \frac{\pi}{16})}$, the type~I see-saw framework with fully constrained Majorana neutrino mass matrices was utilised. These mass matrices also resulted in the neutrino mass ratios, $m_1:m_2:m_3=\frac{\left(2+\sqrt{2}\right)}{1+\sqrt{2(2+\sqrt{2})}}:1:\frac{\left(2+\sqrt{2}\right)}{-1+\sqrt{2(2+\sqrt{2})}}$. In this paper we construct a flavour model based on the discrete group $\Sigma(72\times 3)$ and obtain the aforementioned results. A Majorana neutrino mass matrix (a symmetric $3\times 3$ matrix with 6 complex degrees of freedom) is conveniently mapped into a flavon field transforming as the complex 6 dimensional representation of $\Sigma(72\times 3)$. Specific vacuum alignments of the flavons are used to arrive at the desired mass matrices.Comment: 20 pages, 1 figure. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1402.085

Barrier Frank-Wolfe for Marginal Inference

We introduce a globally-convergent algorithm for optimizing the tree-reweighted (TRW) variational objective over the marginal polytope. The algorithm is based on the conditional gradient method (Frank-Wolfe) and moves pseudomarginals within the marginal polytope through repeated maximum a posteriori (MAP) calls. This modular structure enables us to leverage black-box MAP solvers (both exact and approximate) for variational inference, and obtains more accurate results than tree-reweighted algorithms that optimize over the local consistency relaxation. Theoretically, we bound the sub-optimality for the proposed algorithm despite the TRW objective having unbounded gradients at the boundary of the marginal polytope. Empirically, we demonstrate the increased quality of results found by tightening the relaxation over the marginal polytope as well as the spanning tree polytope on synthetic and real-world instances.Comment: 25 pages, 12 figures, To appear in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) 2015, Corrected reference and cleaned up bibliograph

Public Expenditure Accounatability in the Telecom Sector

The telecom sector has seen much change during the past two decades. At first, it was the opening up of the equipment manufacturing sector, followed by the corporatisation of the government owned entities, Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL) and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL). Subsequently, the sector was opened for private participation in basic, cellular and other value added services. The most recent liberalization moves have been the corporatization of the Department of Telecom into Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) and the privatisation of VSNL.