In numbers: The best of times
21,207: Was the 52-week high for BSE Sensex in January 2008. Incidentally, 7,697 was the 52-week low in October 2008, but that’s another story.
141%: The percentage by which shipments of consumer notebooks grew during the first quarter of 2008, according to International Data Corporation (IDC) India. The shipment of consumer desktops dropped by 6 per cent during the same period.
5,000: The number of mobile phones which are sold every day of the year in India. The total number of mobile phone subscribers in the country is 325 million.
$17.2 billion (Rs 86,000 crore): The amount of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) that India had seen between April and September of 2008.
$14 billion (Rs 70,000 crore): The amount of money foreign institutional investors pulled out of the Indian markets this year. It contributed to the Sensex losing over 60 per cent of its value.
$142 (Rs 7,100): The price of a barrel of Indian crude oil basket in early July—an all-time high. On November 21, it touched its lowest level in three years, when it hit $44 (Rs 2,200) a barrel.
12.34%: The peak rate of inflation in India, which was in the month of September.
11%: The percentage slowdown in growth in air passenger traffic in the first quarter of 2008 at 1.11 crore passengers, from a phenomenal 39 per cent growth a year ago. In 2007, the passenger traffic growth was 33 per cent (a total of 4.28 crore passengers), lower than 2006’s all-time high of 44 per cent.
38%: The share of public transport on the roads in six major metros: Delhi, Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Chennai. This is a sharp drop from the 69 per cent of all vehicles that they represented between 1994 and 2007.
