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IL&FS Transportation Networks to raise Rs 700 cr through IPO

MUMBAI: IL&FS Transportation Networks (ITNL), engaged in building roads on BOT basis (Build-Operate- Transfer) today said it would raise Rs
700 crore though an IPO in Januray for repayment of loan and support its growth plans.

“We have filed the Draft Red Herring Prospectus on September 29 with the market regulator SEBI and hope to open the IPO in the next one to one and a half months,”ITNL Managing Director K Ramchand said.

IL&FS holds around 85 per cent stake in ITNL. Trinity Capital, the AIM listed infrastructure fund, which holds 2.5 per cent stake in ITNL, would exit from the company by diluting its entire stake in the IPO.

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The company is currently executing 12 projects and the order book now stands at Rs 13,000 crore. ITNL would require to infuse Rs 2,000 crore as equity to execute the projects over a period of three years.

The company has entered into a strategic partnership with Airports Authority of India to venture into airport sector and has also been selected for developing 4.9 km elevated metro rail link project in Gurgaon, Ramchand said.

ITNL has not decided on the price band or number of fresh shares to be issued but venture capital fund Bessemer India recently picked up 2.4 per cent stake in ITNL at Rs 242 a share, valuing the company at Rs 4,200 crore, he said.

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I am a climate scientist who worked in the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in the 1990s. I have been reflecting on the bigger lessons to be learned from the stolen emails, some of which were mine. One thing the episode has made clear is that it has become difficult to disentangle political arguments about climate policies from scientific arguments about the evidence for man-made climate change and the confidence placed in predictions of future change. The quality of both political debate and scientific practice suffers as a consequence.

Surveys of public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic about man-made climate change continue to tell us something politicians—indeed leaders of all types throughout human history—know only too well: The citizens they rule over have minds of their own. In the U.K., for example, a recent survey suggested that only 41% believed humans are causing climate change, 32% remained unsure and 15% were convinced we aren’t. Similar surveys in the U.S. have shown a recent reduction in the number of people believing in man-made climate change.

One reaction to this “unreasonableness” is to get scientists to speak louder, more often, or more dramatically about climate change. Another reaction from government bodies and interest groups is to use ever-more-emotional campaigning. Thus both the U.K. government’s recent “bedtime stories” adverts and Plane Stupid’s Internet campaign showing polar bears falling past twin towers, have attracted widespread criticism for being too provocative and scary. These instinctive reactions fail to place the various aspects of our knowledge about climate change—scientific insights, political values, cultural moods, personal beliefs—in right relationship with each other. Too often, when we think we are arguing over scientific evidence for climate change, we are in fact disagreeing about our different political preferences, ethical principles and value systems.

If we build the foundations of our climate-change policies so confidently and so single-mindedly on scientific claims about what the future holds and what therefore “has to be done,” then science will inevitably become the field on which political battles are waged. The mantra becomes: Get the science right, reduce the scientific uncertainties, compel everyone to believe it … and we will have won. Not only is this an unrealistic view about how policy gets made, it also places much too great a burden on science, certainly on climate science with all of its struggles with complexity, contingency and uncertainty.

The events of the last few weeks, involving stolen professional correspondence between a small number of leading climate scientists—so-called climategate—demonstrate my point. Both the theft itself and the alleged contents of some of the stolen emails reveal the strong polarization and intense antagonism now found in some areas of climate science.

Climate scientists, knowingly or not, become proxies for political battles. The consequence is that science, as a form of open and critical enquiry, deteriorates while the more appropriate forums for ideological battles are ignored.

We have also seen how this plays out in public debate. In the wake of climategate, questions were asked on the BBC’s Question Time last week about whether or not global warming was a scam. The absolutist claims of two of the panelists—Daily Mail journalist Melanie Phillips, and comedian and broadcaster Marcus Brigstocke—revealed how science ends up being portrayed as a fight between two dogmas: Either the evidence for man-made climate change is all fake, or else we are so sure we know how the planet works that we can claim to have just five or whatever years to save it. When science is invoked to support such dogmatic assertions, the essential character of scientific knowledge is lost—knowledge that results from open, always questioning, enquiry that, at best, can offer varying levels of confidence for pronouncements about how the world is, or may become.

The problem then with getting our relationship with science wrong is simple: We expect too much certainty, and hence clarity, about what should be done. Consequently, we fail to engage in honest and robust argument about our competing political visions and ethical values.

Science never writes closed textbooks. It does not offer us a holy scripture, infallible and complete. This is especially the case with the science of climate, a complex system of enormous scale, at every turn influenced by human contingencies. Yes, science has clearly revealed that humans are influencing global climate and will continue to do so, but we don’t know the full scale of the risks involved, nor how rapidly they will evolve, nor indeed—with clear insight—the relative roles of all the forcing agents involved at different scales.

Similarly, we endow analyses about the economics of climate change with too much scientific authority. Yes, we know there is a cascade of costs involved in mitigating, adapting to or ignoring climate change, but many of these costs are heavily influenced by ethical judgements about how we value things, now and in the future. These are judgments that science cannot prescribe.

The central battlegrounds on which we need to fight out the policy implications of climate change concern matters of risk management, of valuation, and political ideology. We must move the locus of public argumentation here not because the science has somehow been “done” or “is settled”; science will never be either of these things, although it can offer powerful forms of knowledge not available in other ways. It is a false hope to expect science to dispel the fog of uncertainty so that it finally becomes clear exactly what the future holds and what role humans have in causing it. This is one reason why British columnist George Monbiot wrote about climategate, “I have seldom felt so alone.” By staking his position on “the science,” he feels alone and betrayed when some aspect of the science is undermined.

If climategate leads to greater openness and transparency in climate science, and makes it less partisan, it will have done a good thing. It will enable science to function in the effective way it must in public policy deliberations: Not as the place where we import all of our legitimate disagreements, but one powerful way of offering insight about how the world works and the potential consequences of different policy choices. The important arguments about political beliefs and ethical values can then take place in open and free democracies, in those public spaces we have created for political argumentation.

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How’s this for irony: the extremist group behind the drive to recruit Lou Dobbs into a presidential run has yanked support for their one-time champion.

While bloggers debated whether Dobbs was too mean to be President, it came out that he was no longer mean enough for the extreme base he’s cultivated all these years. The Plum Line’s Greg Sargent writes:

Wow. Lou Dobbs, putative presidential candidate, just can’t catch a break.

Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC), one of the most extreme anti-immigrant groups out there, isn’t happy with Dobbs’ recent statement that creating a way for hard-working, undocumented people to regularize their status and become legal citizens might not be such a bad idea.  Not only that, but Dobbs made those comments on Telemundo, a network that broadcasts in Español (gasp!).

Understandably, the reaction from Dobbs’ extremist base was essentially, “OMG!! WTF!?!  Why Lou Why!”

Or, to be precise:

Who are you and what have you done with Lou Dobbs?

But extremists of the world should be rest assured– those of us who believe in treating everyone in America with equal dignity and solving the immigration crisis aren’t ready to claim Dobbs as one of our own.  You see, Lou Dobbs has a habit of fibbing a little. Whether it’s that immigrants are bringing a new wave of leprosy to America or that the President of the United States might be an undocumented immigrant from Kenya, Dobbs is ready and willing to push the envelope on journalistic and personal integrity.

So, my ALIPAC amigos, while Dobbs may sound a lot less like that grumpy old man whose rants and rails against immigrants were the cornerstone of your movement, I wouldn’t fret. Deep down inside, I’m sure he’s still got it in him.

But I’ve got a question for all of you extremists out there – why are we still paying attention to this guy?  After all, Lou Dobbs is now just a man who had a TV show once, fired from CNN, and two other networks have said that they won’t hire him.  Imagine what else you could do with all the money you were going to spend propping him up after his 15 minutes of fame dries up.

So, this Mexican-American, constitution-hugging, diversity-loving advocate invites the anti-immigrant extremists of the world to unite with me for a common purpose – let’s just ignore him.  Together we can help Lou Dobbs make a speedy transition to TV has-been status.  Let’s just get it over with.  Are you with me?

Cross-Posted at America’s Voice and Huffington Post.

One after another, speakers at the Democratic Governors Association meeting yesterday in Washington said how tricky 2010 would prove for just about anybody seeking to gain or hold office. One example is Alabama, where Republican Gov. Bob Riley is term-limited — and a young, Harvard-educated, Democratic representative in Congress is seeking to replace him.

Should he win the Democratic primary and general election, Rep. Artur Davis would become the first African American governor in a state still dogged by its bleak civil rights history. Mr. Davis’s polling shows that Alabama voters are increasingly willing to elect a black to state-wide office.

Still, he would be giving up a safe Congressional seat for what many consider a high-risk, though potentially history-making, venture. Mr. Davis has repeatedly held his current seat with at least three-fourths of the vote since coming to Congress in 2002. The district is 64% black.

On the other hand, though two of the last four Alabama governors have been Democrats, Barack Obama — Mr. Davis’s friend in law school — did abysmally there, losing the state by 21 points after pretty much writing it off from the start.

“More than a few people have asked me: Why are you giving up a safe seat in the U.S. Congress to run in a pretty red state?” Mr. Davis said yesterday at the DGA event. “Something is stirring in the state of Alabama right now.”

Mr. Davis said that in the 19 polls he has seen on the race since September 2007, “We have been ahead of or within the margin of error of every Republican in every poll.”

For its part, the DGA less sanguinely lists Alabama as a second-tier pick-up opportunity for Democrats, along with Alaska, Georgia, Hawaii and Utah. Top-tier opportunities outlined yesterday by DGA Executive Director Nathan Daschle include Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Minnesota, Nevada and Vermont.