Global index provider Dow Jones Indexes and Dharma Investments, a private investment firm, today announced the launch of the Dow Jones Dharma Indexes measuring the performance of companies selected according to the value systems and principles of dharmic religions, especially Hinduism and Buddhism.

The series includes the Dow Jones Dharma Global Index and four country Indexes for US, UK, Japan and India. The indices are designed to track financial products such as exchange-traded funds and other investable products that enable investors to participate in the performance of companies compliant with dharmic traditions. [BusinessStandard]

So what constitutes as “dharmic”? Well, it’s easier to start with what’s not dharmic:

Excluded from the index are companies from sectors that are deemed unacceptable due to the nature of their business activities and operations. Excluded are also companies that have exposure to unacceptable business practices. Some examples of unacceptable sectors are aerospace and defense, brewers, casinos and gaming, pharmaceuticals, tobacco. Some examples for unacceptable business practices are alcohol, adult entertainment, animal testing and genetic modification of agricultural products. [AlBawaba]

It seems that touting your company as “socially responsible” is a big draw for investors all around the world. I suppose that’s a good thing.

Worldwide, socially responsible investing (SRI), as it is known, has taken off in a big way with assets increasing from $639 billion in 1995 to $2.29 trillion in 2005. In the US, SRI assets represent over 10% of the total assets under management. [BusinessStandard]

So being listed on the Dharmic Index would mean that your company can adopt a holier-than-thou attitude towards the competition. The Economic Times has a quote from the CEO of Dharma Investments, with an interesting typo.

“The Down Jones Dharma Indexes bring together a combination of environmental, social, governance and traditional sin sector filters.

As such, the index is unique and will not just have appeal to the religious, but to a far broader audience as well,” Dharma Investments CEO Nitesh Gor told the media. [EconomicTimes]

What exactly is a “traditional sin” anyway? And what’s a non-traditional one, for that matter?

The article discusses, amongst other things, Dhirubhai, the Reliance empire, oil refining and more. They spend an inordinate amount of space discussing Mukesh’s new $1 billion apartment building that’s coming up on Altamount Road. They even talk about the Bollywood film Guru which is loosely based on Dhirubhai’s life. The money quote comes from a Chevron VP, where he talks about the current state of affairs in Indian business:

Says Tom Simons, a vice president of Chevron, “There were the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts, huge companies that were family owned. That’s where India is now. It is a bit of a Wild West thing here, but they’ll get through it. I wish they’d build some roads, though.” [link]

That’s certainly a classic quote. Chevron is a minor investor (with options to increase their stake) in Mukesh’s plan to build what will eventually be the world’s biggest oil refinery in Gujarat.

And apropos of the last time I blogged about the Western media and Bombay, there’s a quote from Nita Ambani (Mukesh’s wife). Before I get there though, I’ll regurgitate that old quote from the NYT article just because it’s such a classic.

The ladies who lunch don’t speak of their philanthropic work to end the city’s abject poverty. “There are simply too many suffering,” one socialite explained. “So we focus on things we can actually have an impact on, like art and gardening.” [link]

I’m still not over that one. They don’t bother to do anything about the poverty because there’s too much of it. Jeez. And in case you’re wondering, the “ladies who lunch” are the soy-latte-drinking, soccer-mom equivalents of Bombay – the upper-middle class housewives. And here’s Nita Ambani cementing her position in there:

Ambani’s wife, Nita, who looks after Reliance’s corporate-responsibility program, explains that she and her husband make a special effort to keep their children grounded, citing the family’s trip to Washington. “Our daughter flew with us in the private plane, while our sons stayed behind in New York,” she says. After the other family members had left, the boys got lonely and wanted to join them. “We both decided not to send the plane back to get them. They took the train! We’re striving very hard to make them live a normal life.” [link]

No private plane, huh? Damn, that’s harsh! How did they manage? Do you think they reached safely? It’s going to keep me up nights, you know…

She writhes and rubs her nearly naked body against as many as seven men, doing “lap dances” for $400 an hour. (The room costs an additional $200 for the hour.) Hart, who once worked for a venture-capital firm, always asks what brought the men together. They often say they’re having a meeting.”I say, ‘You’re having a business meeting in a strip club?’ ” Hart says in an interview in the dressing room at Rick’s Cabaret here.

It’s not just strippers who have questions. Some women on Wall Street want to know how it can be fair — or legal — for their managers and male colleagues to exclude them when they fraternize at strip clubs, often with the women’s clients.

There was big news, overnight, about India’s currency, the rupee. Now, a lot of you know that we’ve shied away from the rupee because of its ‘non-deliverable’ status. Well, that could all change in the future, if the stories this morning are bang on.

The dollar, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to be looking that good according to the Free Market News Network. What can the Fed do about it?

Speaking of the falling dollar, does anyone realize that with the rising US debt and the never-ending Iraq war, that this war is being funded by other countries? China, for one.

It is not the first empire to rely on financing from its rivals – the English counted on the United States to pay for World War I – but it is the first empire, ever, to squander its borrowed money and its military strength in a war against nobody.

More here at the FMNN’s summary of The Daily Reckoning.

If you know anything about finance and trading on the NYSE, then you know that the “specialists” are those traders who match buyers with sellers on the trading floor. They also have (somewhat) of a say in what the bid and ask prices are. In fact, some years ago a bunch of financial economists discovered that some market makers (what specialists are called on the NASDAQ exchange) were setting the ask prices only in even-eights (that is, 2/8, 4/8, etc.) to boost their own profits on the trades.

So perhaps reducing the hold of these specialists is a good thing. Then again, if this is a signal of things to come, and if, at some point in the future, specialists are eliminated entirely, then with their departure will go a centuries-old tradition on the exchange floor.

Technology has radically altered the way financial instruments are priced and traded. Both in terms of the ease of computational efficiency with faster processors as well as the ease of trading over the internet. A lot of things are going to change drastically in the next decade as far as the exchanges are concerned.

Much of the money spent by the government on development schemes gets diverted by corrupt officials and subsidies meant for the poor do not reach those who need these the most.

At the same time, affluent Indians living in urban areas cities flaunt lifestyles that are comparable to those of the rich in developed countries.

However, even in cities of concrete and steel that glitter on the surface, a third of the residents live in abject poverty, denied secure jobs, social security and access to basic sanitation facilities and clean drinking water.

The challenge to alleviate the lot of India’s poor remains unfulfilled.

Ok, I agree there are serious problems. And I’m the first one to be skeptical. But to see that -at least on paper- the government is trying to help the poor, strengthen infrastructure and improve literacy and public health, gives me an iota (and mind you, it’s just an iota nothing more) of hope. It’s probably going to be dashed to the ground anyhow, but we’ll see. I think the phrase du jour is “cautious optimism.”