Of all the functions of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), there is one routine task crucial to the health of the economy: incinerating the mounds of soiled currency notes well past their prime and providing the commercial banks with mint-fresh replacements. Last month, in an effort to clear the backlog of ‘non-issuable notes’-inevitable when…
Delhi University is one of the few in the country to possess a full-fledged faculty of music. But for years now, the Music Department has been rocked by a clash between the shastrakars (grammarians) and the kalavidhs (performers). At the root of the controversy lies the dilemma of whether university teachers of music ought to…
Whatever else the government is butter-fingered at doing, it is adept at keeping the results of its impetuosity in a state of continuing suspense’. The campaign against the Bihar Press Bill is almost four months old now, but the Government has only indulged in a lot of double-talk—swearing by press freedom in one breath, and…
Two experts on Soviet studies, both lecturers in major universities, were informed late last month by the University Grants Commission (UGC) that their applications for short-term post-doctoral research trips to the USSR had been rejected. No reasons were given, but both lecturers believe it was because they were not considered politically acceptable. Another lecturer in…
Tyres are one essential commodity over which the Government seems to exert no control whatsoever. In the last six months prices have risen twice. And this is despite the fact that the last decade has seen a sudden burgeoning in the number of tyre-manufacturing units, which caused worries last year that there would be a…
While it lasted, last fortnight’s nine-hour hostage hold-up in Congress(l) Member of Parliament Dalbir Singh’s.Delhi apartment generated wild images of urban terrorism on the loose. lt was the first time ever that the problems of distant, rural India had been so dramatised and Ram Narayan Kumar, the improbable attacker, appeared to signal a new and…
Hiteswar Saikia was last Fortnight trying to settle into the hottest seat in India-the chief ministers hip of Assam. The diminutive, balding ‘politician had been selected to lead a ministry that had obtained one of india’s largest-ever majorities-91 seats out of 109. But the mandate had come drenched in blood, and ridden on an abysmally…
All private secretaries to Union ministers are equal, but S.R. Bhatia is more equal. Bhatia is the private secretary to Prakash Chand Sethi, the Union home minister, and currently he is at the centre of a storm that is battering at the doors of the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) and the Central Secretariat Service…
There was the baby-faced ex-pilot, all thumbs as he handled the controls in his political flight simulator; the rough-spun son of the, soil, a man of diamond-hard loyalty to the ruling family. catapulted into a devalued presidency; the freckle faced widow in rebellious flow, queen of the mimics and endowed with a hard nose; the…
For all those journalists who think they belong to a thankless and poorly-paid profession, there is hope on the horizon. It comes from the latest impresario to champion the “welfare and relief” of India’s toiling journalists: Jinendra Kumar Jain, 42. From obscure beginnings as a small-time publisher, Jain has used every ‘journalistic’ rung to hop…
Lush vegetation in the Thar? Groves of jamun trees? Mighty rivers the size of the Ganga and Indus? Seasons of monsoon-like rainfall? None of this is the fantasy it might appear at first sight. It was true in the distant past of the vast, inhospitable expanse of the Thar desert known to be one of…
The fuse has been burning for almost four years and the mood in the state has passed through all the faces of anger, despair and belligerence to arrive, on election eve, at the explosive. Gauhati has become unrecognisable. Once the citadel of lahe lahe, the Assamese philosophy of languor and peaceability, the capital now rumbles…
There is an old Indian parable that says it all: six blind men feel various parts of an elephant’s anatomy, and each one extrapolates, from his experience, a vision of a funny world. The difference, of course, is that everybody is talking about three old men-charan Singh, 79, Morarji Desai, 86, and Jagjivan Ram, 74,…
Events In Mizoram seems to be moving inexorably towards a resumption of insurgency. The cease-fire agreement, which came into effect at midnight on July 31 last year, has never seemed more fragile than it is now. As the indecisive talks with Mizo National Front (MNF) President Laldenga near the end of their sixth year, the…
Pranab Mukherjee’s first budget, at first glance so redolent of status quo, is peppered with little booby traps. Two paragraphs in his speech have caused heartburn amidst tyre manufacturers—who are dismayed about a stiff excise hike—and soft drink bottlers, who are cut up because Mukherjee has cracked down on soft drink franchises’ excise exemptions. The…
It was a browser’s dream come true – kilometres of books that took hold of the bibliophile’s heart-strings and did not stop tugging for hours. For eleven days last fortnight, Delhi’s Pragati Maidan became a meeting-place of minds. From a distance. as the Fifth World Book Fair moved to its finish in a welter of…
It was a visitation of grief and destruction, a cruel twist to the suffering Gujarat was already shrouded in. Meteorologists first noticed the brewing cyclone over the Arabian Sea on November 5, 1,200 km to the south-west of Goa. Forty-eight hours later it was just 600 km to the south-west of Bombay, and heading rapidly…
It was beyond the ken of a civilised society, a blood spattered vindication of a heartless government’s sudden constitutional piety. The carnage began with a few deaths on February 2; during the next three weeks, it rose every day with dreadful ferocity: a dozen at Cha maria on the 12th, a hundred at Gohpur on…
The Rashtriya Swyamsewak Sangh (RSS) is everybody’s favourite bugbear. So perhaps it was inevitable that it would be accused of having a hand in the feud between Mrs Gandhi and her rebellious daughter-in law Maneka. But though the charges can never really be substantiated, there is a connection which leads credence to the charge-the friendship…
Titled Judiciary: Attacks and Survival, the speech had been long in coming, the speaker delayed, first by an attack of diabetes in March and then by the postponement of the Dussehra break. On October 29, as Justice Vidyaranya Dattatreya Tulzapurkar of the Supreme Court finally faced an invited audience at the Symbiosis Law College in…
Large advertisements in Delhi newspapers-last fortnight announced that Mother Dairy was being forced to dilute the fat content of milk supplied to the capital’s citizens to 3 per cent from 4.5 per cent so that the sale price could remain Rs 2.20 per litre. At Mother Dairy booths, lengthening queues were often turned away because…
When Frenchman Bernard Bel and American Jim Arnold met by chance in a Delhi hotel in September 1979, it turned out to be a momentous occasion for Indian music. In the two years since, Bel and Arnold have together embarked on an ambitious research of Hindustani classical music’s vast oral tradition along mathematical lines. Never…
Not for nothing has Mizo National Front (MNF) President Laldenga acquired a reputation for being a cool and calculating man. Towards the end of 1981, however, his smooth phrases took on a jagged edge, as his talks with the prime minister’s special envoy G. Parthasarathi entered the final lap. Mizoram-watchers were not surprised, therefore, when…
Rarely had an event invited such determined and concerted action by Union Government: When the 24-hour national strike called by the National Campaign Committee (NCC) ended at 6 a.m. on January 20. two things stood out clearly: the effects of the strike were either negligible or tremendous, depending on which side of the fence the…
Although it is a blasphemous thought, it has cropped up in many a legal mind during the last few weeks: if bets were placed on the Supreme Court’s decisions, only a very shrewd bookie would emerge victorious. So unpredictable have the thought-processes of the nation’s highest court become. A three-judge bench consisting of Chief Justice…
Two experts on Soviet studies, both lecturers in major universities, were informed late last month by the University Grants Commission (UGC) that their applications for short-term post-doctoral research trips to the USSR had been rejected. No reasons were given, but both lecturers believe it was because they were not considered politically acceptable. Another lecturer in…
Counter-Insurgency Deep inside the jungle in northernmost Mizoram, a lone man brews a tin mug of tea in the early morning haze. He is squatting on the bamboo floor of a makeshift shelter covered with banana leaves. Beneath it fails away the precipitous hillside, all 3,000 feet of it densely carpeted with bamboo and teak…
The salaried middle classes have time and again fallen prey to the Government’s more capricious economic decisions. But, one group that has suffered the most from constantly rising costs of living is the large, amorphous mass of the nation’s pensioners. Bereft of a common voice, nearly three million retired government employees and defence personnel have…
The India-Rubber man, Jagannath Mishra, had done it again. For months, the Bihar chief minister’s political fate had hung in the balance while the Supreme Court heard the Patna Urban Cooperative Bank case. Then, last fortnight, Mishra’s fortunes took a sudden upward swing. On December 16, the Supreme Court held, by a two-one majority, that…
Convicted killers Billa and Ranga were expected to make headlines last fortnight. Make news, they certainly did, but not the way everybody anticipated. Instead of being walked to the gallows on the morning of Sunday. November 8. 1981, in retribution for the brutal murder of Gita and Sanjay Chopra on August 26, 1978, the two…
Political cinema, like the new wave of the mid-’70s, has long acquired a pejorative meaning in India. At most, a political film that catches the public eye is built around a social theme that fits in with the Government’s meandering philosophy. A ‘successful’ political film also usually turns out to be feature-length, in colour, and…
Qutab Minar, the 72.5-metre-high monolithic tower that Iltutmish built 750 years ago, witnessed two shocks in its hoary life-span. In 1368, it was struck by lightning that ripped through its top; in 1803, an earthquake shook down a harp-shaped cupola that adorned its fifth storey. The latest shock, which came last fortnight, damaged none of…
I know no one can do me no harm because happiness is a warm gun. Yes it is. — John Lennon. 1968 Vishwanath Pratap Singh had cause to be happy on December 30 The prime minister herself had come down to Lucknow to pat him on his back and give his ministry a clean chit.…
“My resignation over the Dehuli issue is not important, law and order is,” was Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh’s answer when asked why, after owning moral responsibility for the massacre, he had not quit. “Either we protect the survivors, and liquidate the killers, or we might as well find somebody else to run…
On January 18 the strike by 2.5 lakh textile workers in Bombay’s 60 mills will complete a year; 25,000 of these workers in eight mills have been on strike since October 1981. In every way, the lengthening strike has become a grim milestone in India’s industrial history, with the opposing sides only gaining in belligerence…
So Ham-Handed and desperate for representatives of any stature in Assam has the Congress(I) become that it has jettisoned all concern for decorum and dignity in the loftiest institution of the land, the Supreme Court. Exactly four weeks after he delivered a judgment that granted Bihar Chief Minister Jagannath Mishra a reprieve from trial for…
Nearly two months after a shocked Parliament was rocked by the Nellie and Gohpur massacres and the bloodbath that had drenched Assam during February’s’ election week, the issue had all but been forgotten by both government and opposition. Suddenly last fortnight it was revived by journalist Arun Shourie’s scathing expose in the last issue of…
Every dissenter is in a minority of one, and K. Ashok Rao, 36, deputy manager in Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL), is discovering what it is like to take on this public sector leviathan. Rao is, after all, only one of BHEL’S 70,000 employees. Yet, on February 23 this year, Rao filed a writ petition…
The Quality of justice seemed to be under tremendous strain last fortnight. At issue was the vexatious question of capital punishment. As usual, the shock waves emanated from an indecisive Supreme Court. In November 1981, the court had stayed executions all over the country after it was contended in the case of Kuljit Singh (alias…
That trite phrase ‘as old as the hills’ has suddenly taken on startling significance in relation to a thread that runs through Hindu beliefs: the cult of mother-worship. a veneration of the shakti form that harks back to primeval times. Recently, an lndo-US team of archaeologists working in the Son valley in Madhya Pradesh Sidhi…
I am your valuable,/The Pure gold baby,/That melts to a shriek,/I turn and burn,/Do not think I underestimate your/great concern./Ash, ash/You poke and stir,/Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—A cake of soap,/ A wedding ring,/A gold filling. …
The sprawling city that Charles-Edouard le Corbusier had designed for bureaucrats and retired people looked like an army encampment girding up for an enemy onslaught. As the expected moment of conflict neared, Chandigarh’s streets were gradually cordoned off with bamboo and steel barricades; a vast area taking in the Punjab, Haryana and Union territory secretariats,…
Iran’s much-vaunted Islamic revolution appears to have finally spilled over into India. Chanting Allah-o–Akbar and wielding primitive weapons like lathis bristling with nails, bicycle chains, knives and iron rods, a group of 100 pro-Khomeini Iranian students attacked 25 anti-Khomeini counterparts under cover of darkness in Aligarh on June 9. The bloody battle left 14 of…
Last week-end the seesaw battle being waged by Swraj Paul to take over Escorts and DCM slowed to a less suspenseful motion when the London-based industrialist suffered a series of setbacks. The first and predictable one came when Escorts’ Board of Directors refused on June 9 to register 4,62,377 shares lodged by Paul’s brokers Harish…
Rope-Making On Summer nights all over north India. people put out hundreds of thousands of cots in the open air to sleep on Most of the cots are made of rope strung on a wooden frame, and almost all of the rope comes from Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh. Rope-making in Saharanpur is a traditional skill…
There are times when India looks invincible, bursting with food stocks and blessed with a government that is gungho about its workability. But the rain gods do not work to a 20-point programme, and last fortnight weathermen the country over were developing cricks in their necks as they stared hopefully into the pale blue and…
Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s health more than anything else has been responsible for the sudden thaw in Delhi-Srinagar relations For a while last month Kashmir teetered on the brink of an insoluble crisis while the prickly Resettlement Bill hung fire, the Sheikh grew more belligerent and the Centre seemed trapped in a peculiar inertia. Then, on…
Within a few years from now, the westernmost and thirstiest fringe of Rajasthan, along the Indo-Pakistani border, is going to be brought to life by the digging of what will be the longest irrigation canal in the world up to date. Though the climate is torrid, the soil, here too, is good. When the water…
The story is as complicated as the whorls on a fingerprint, a ready-made screen-play bursting with grandeur, feudalism, pretension, and the tattered remnants of pomp and panoply. The theatre of this absurd epic, Raj Darbhanga in Bihar, has been reduced today to a threadbare relic of the fiefdom’s old glory. Darbhanga was once India’s largest…
Indian foreign policy has always suffered from contradictory tugs and pulls, and last month the Government exposed its tendency to over-react to global developments. Israeli Consul Yousuf Hasseen earned his expulsion with an outspoken interview with Bombay’s Sunday Observer (INDIA TODAY. July 31). But the subsequent announcement by Foreign Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao that…
No point of no return was so final as the one Charan Singh and Devi Lal reached on July 21. The crusty Jat leaders have clashed repeatedly over the last two years and a half-only to be dragged back into uneasy reconciliation every time by mediators. Incredibly, Charan Singh moved to hammer the last nail…
Anticlimax has become the boon companion of the Supreme Court. When the court reopened on July 18 after its summer vacation, it was shadowed by the cloud raised by stays granted on more than 20 executions of condemned murderers throughout the country. The flurry of stay orders stemmed from a May 6 ruling by a…
The 35-km ride from Katunayake International Airport into Colombo in a slow Mitsubishi coach I driven by a nervous Sinhala I is enveloped in silence. Almost every Indian visitor is heading for the Lanka Oberoi, or the Galle Face, or the Ceylon Intercontinental— hotels that have escaped the attention of mobs in search of hiding…
It was a grim warning for all users of intemperate language, and particularly for citizens of India who continue to believe that caste bestows special rights on an individual. Untouchability has long ago been ‘abolished’, but caste prejudice is one of the most insidious cankers eating into the country’s vitals. At 4 p.m. on August…
Ganesha’s temple had never seen so many supplicants, all with unanswerable prayers Colombo’s Tamils call it Pillaiyar Kovil, and its ornamented gateway on Galle Road in the Wella-watta area is flanked by carefully incinerated Tamil shops. Wella-watta was a genteel Tamil ghetto. Now the temple is a refugee camp, and cheek-by-jowl stand three others at…
One of the misconceptions spawned by the Bihar Press Bill is that it will emasculate Bihar’s journalists. The truth is that Bihar’s journalists have already been emasculated by Chief Minister Jagannath Mishra. Using the twin methods of patronage and advertisement support, Mishra’s Government has directly subsidised an explosion of small papers across the state-the very…
In the coolness of the early morning there is little traffic on National Highway 3. Outward bound from Nasik, the tar stretches infinitely in mottled grey, punctuated by the whoosh and blare of passing trucks. Through the sounds of the stirring countryside come the choral slaps of the marchers’ feet. It is a curious cavalcade—at…
Without second-generation reforms and a drastic overhaul of its institutions, India is condemned to mediocre income and growth. As befits an ancient land, India is not bereft of clairvoyants. Three times over the past decade, some of our best economists, managers, bureaucrats, industrialists, politicians and private citizens put their brains together and came up with…
After a lifetime spent powering TCS to its current position as the country’s pre-eminent technology company, S. Ramadorai took over as Advisor to the Prime Minister in the National Council for Skill Development in February 2011. He spoke to Chaitanya Kalbag and Shamn Pande on the gigantic skiIIing challenge the country faces. Edited excerpts: It…
A disgraced Ranbaxy has a long and expensive journey ahead before it regains the trust of global and Indian customers. By E. Kumar Sharma and Chaitanya Kalbag Two inspectors working for the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), on a trip to a Ranbaxy Laboratories factory late in January 2008, were stunned by what they…
Two days after he and a brother judge handed down a blistering verdict in the Centre for Public Interest Litigation & Others vs Union of India & Others case, cancelling 122 telecom licences and severely indicting a former minister, now a jailbird, Justice ASOK KUMAR GANGULY was at peace in his study at home, behind…
Kishore Biyani reveals why he sold a controlling stake in his flagship Pantaloons stores to the Aditya Birla Group in a candid conversation with Chaitanya Kalbag Kishore Biyani is waiting, relaxed, in a darkened hotel suite. He’s just flown in from cool London to broiling Gurgaon. He talks softly and very fast, jumping in before…
V. Vaidyanathan takes wing with a $17 million stake in a star NBFC. By Chaitanya Kalbag The next time you are flying somewhere, do not bury your nose in a book or plug in your earphones. Take a good look around. And if you happen to be sitting next to Vembu Vaidyanathan, a wiry, fast-talking…
Quit moaning and hear the good news, folks! India is going to be the world’s largest beef exporter in 2012, beating out Australia and Brazil with 1.4 million tonnes of buffalo meat hoofing it to distant shores. You may think the domestic economy is all blood and gore, but it is not. Last weekend, it…
Maruti will not end Contract-Worker System Simmering unrest among contract workers at the Manesar (Haryana) plant of Maruti Suzuki exploded in violence and arson on July 18; one HR executive died, and 96 employees were injured. Suzuki Motor Corp Chairman Osamu Suzuki made a point of visiting Manesar and meeting every injured worker during a…
“There are companies which are defying the law…. We have taken a series of measures.” In the 20 months he has been Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Board of India, Upendra Kumar Sinha has taken several initiatives, but has also been involved in controversies. The Supreme Court order upholding SEBI’s decision asking Sahara to…
Until July 1991, directors at Indian companies could not be paid more than ₹15,000 a month. Commissions as a percentage of net profits were permitted but capped at half the annual salary. Today, the top-paid director in India, steel tycoon Naveen Jindal, takes home more than ₹6 crore a month, and scores of Indian CEOs…
Roberto Zagha has been the World Bank’s Country Director in India since January 2009, when the economy was reeling from the global financial crisis and just before the national elections that brought the UPA back to power. Zagha, a Brazilian national, has been closely involved with India policy at the Bank for 17 years. During…
“Everybody is going to die, but I am going to die last.” He started out as a scrap trader in Patna. Today, with a personal fortune of $3.5 billion, Anil Agarwal is one of the richest men in the world. Over the last three decades, he has transformed the Vedanta Group into a $14-billion minerals…
Gujarat’s Chief Minister tells Chaitanya Kalbag in a wide-ranging interview that policy and process make a heady development cocktail Narendra Modi is not a tall man, but he exudes self-assurance and authority. There is something of the High Priest of Mohenjo-Daro about him, presiding at the altar of Capitalist Gujarat under the gaze of an…
British historian and Harvard University professor [Niall Ferguson] An erudite scholar, acclaimed author, and the William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, British historian Niall Ferguson wears several hats. At the India Today Conclave, Ferguson spoke on “American decline: Myth and Reality”. On the Sidelines of the Conclave, BT’s Chaitanya Kalbag,…
The Jan Lokpal Bill may need to move from idealism to realism; the solution may also lie in granting independence and teeth to existing agencies created to fight corruption. The three men stood up, glowered at me, and began shouting in chorus. They ignored the business card I had introduced myself with. How dare I…
Since June 2005, when he took up the mantle of Non-executive Chairman of Hindustan Unilever (then Hindustan Lever), harish manwani has seen three executive leadership changes at the consumer goods major. First, there were two managing directors, Arun Adhikari and S. Ravindranath, under him. Expat Doug Baillie ran hul between March 2006 and April 2008…
YOGESH CHANDER DEVESHWAR has been with ITC for nearly 43 years. The past 15 years as chairman and chief executive. Having turned ITC into a multi-product company no longer synonymous with cigarettes, he is seeking a five-year extension during which a successor will be anointed. In a candid interview with CHAITANYA KALBAG, he talks of…
The US is on life support, and Asian creditors led by China, which holds $1.16 trillion of US treasuries, control the intravenous drip. Asian central banks will not be dumping their dollar assets, but there is no doubt that US power is waning. For a while there, it looked like we would all, lemming-like, race…
Edited excerpts of a conversation BT’s Chaitanya Kalbag and Josey Puliyenthuruthel had with GE Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt On the US economy Things are getting better in the United States. It’s a slow recovery, and some of that is based on how steep the crisis was, on consumer deleveraging, and the savings rate going…
The US economy needs India more than ever, says Barack Obama had barely walked out of Parliament’s Central Hall when the debate began on whether his India visit was “transactional” or “strategic”. It was neither. Obama, accompanied by an unusually large contingent of CEOs, many of them small and medium businessmen, was in search of…
“In India, I See a Lot More Acceptance of Gender in the Workplace” Do you think the India-US CEO Forum you are a member of has managed to get things moving a bit in terms of a more positive attitude towards bilateral trade? It is very important to get things on the table to understand…
Nitish Kumar’s victory in last month’s Bihar election celebrates the triumph of economics over feudalism, but the climb out of poverty will be steep and hard. Schoolgirls on bicycles. Schools that actually function. Half of all panchayat posts are reserved for women. Close to 40,000 criminals were put behind bars. Roads that can be driven…
On September 25, the day Prime Minister Narendra Modi received the Gates Foundation’s Global Goalkeepers Award in New York for his leadership of the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM), two Dalit children, Avinash and Roshni, were beaten to death in a Madhya Pradesh village for defecating in the open. Two days later the Jal Shakti ministry’s…
As we prepare to vote, lots of loose talk lies ahead If you believe in the theory of evolution, as I do, then you will agree that one of the very few things that separates us from our earliest ancestors is the faculty of speech. Scientists speculate that we were communicating through speech as far…
Assam’s register of citizens is a poisoned chalice What will India do with 1.9 million illegal immigrants in Assam? The publication of the final National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam on August 31 marked the end of a mammoth six-year project, the largest winnowing of a population in our history. It might be the…
Take a deep breath and don’t run for the door Reading An Account of the Great Fear, or Grande Peur, that swept across France in July and August of 1789, I was struck by the description of what triggered the French Revolution: “economic concerns, rural panic and the power of rumour” With the BSE Sensex…
Will we get a Lokpal? Will we not? The answer is blowin’ in the wind It’s a nail-biter. I predicted in another column that the Lok pal Search Committee of eight eminent persons might cap a five-year slow waltz just before the general election. On January 17, the Supreme Court instructed the committee to come up…
It’s good we now have a GST, but its design is another matter Since you all love acronyms for the Good and Simple Tax and the Grand Stupid Thought, the headline is my humble contribution to your lexicon. I dare you to find me a single expert who can measure the financial cost of the…
The government must resist the temptation to dip its hand in the till. The Reserve Bank Of India (RBI) is the best-run company in India: transparent, diligent, accountable, and (ostensibly) independent. Its official capital is a paltry Rs 5 crore, yet year after year it rewards its sole shareholder, the government, with mind-boggling dividends. The…
Governments cynically scoop out value from their own companies. Privatisation will work only when the government sells more than 50 per cent of a state-owned company’s capital to the public and relinquishes management control. This has not happened. Successive governments have mostly destroyed value by divesting only thin slivers of public sector undertakings (PSUs) and…
The government must take courage and embrace privatisation Two numbers speak eloquently about our schizophrenia over privatisation: the Rs 2.11 trillion ($32.5 billion) package announced on October 24 to recapitalise public-sector banks (PSBs); and Rs 2.67 trillion ($41 billion), the total earned by the government in 26 years from the divestment of its stakes, in…
Let’s quit beating the bushes and chase the real quarry The government is striving mightily, but the needle is moving inexorably lower on the jobs meter. The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) and the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) jointly produce a weekly unemployment rate based on a sample of about 12,000 adults in the…
Can the new Railway minister outrun the challenges? Piyush Goyal is a chartered accountant, lawyer, former investment banker, former Bharatiya Janata Party treasurer, and a go-getter. Goyal, who likes taking leadership courses (currently Harvard; and Yale and Oxford and Princeton earlier) likes stretch targets, just as his boss Narendra Modi favours BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious…
When Aung San Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, two years after the Dalai Lama and two years before Nelson Mandela, she was hailed as “Burma’s Modern Symbol of Freedom” for her non-violent campaign against the ruling military junta. At that time Suu Kyi was under house arrest in Yangon and her son Alexander, accepting the prize on his mother’s behalf in Oslo, said though she was described as a political dissident, “her quest is basically spiritual”.
That was then. For months now, Suu Kyi has been criticised for not bringing peace to Rakhine state, home to the Muslim Rohingya minority. In April, when the BBC asked her if she was an amalgam of Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa, she said: “I’m just a politician…I’m no Mother Teresa… Mahatma Gandhi actually was a very astute politician.” When asked if she wasn’t tempted to follow Gandhi’s example of putting his own life at risk for India’s minority Muslims, Suu Kyi said: “I don’t think that putting one’s life at risk is a particular example that I’d like to follow.”
Wish the government would stop trying to defend demonetisation. Every time there is bad economic news, the government jumps up to proclaim that demonetisation was the boldest and best reform since cowrie shells were first used as currency three thousand years ago (now you know the origin of “ek phooti kauri”). Trying too hard to…
Can we even dream of saying bye-bye to China’s economy? Sushma swaraj said it simply in parliament in early August when she ruled out war with China over the Doklam plateau: “China has contributed to our growing economic strength. For them, there’s a lot at stake… here. They have been awarded many contracts.” That’s putting…
Team leader Modi is fishing in a shallow talent pool How much of a hurry is prime minister Narendera Modi in? It depends on your horizon. By one measure, he has 22 months, but then he has set an October 2, 2019 deadline for Swachh Bharat, and August 15, 2022 for a New India. Mohan…
India is trying to do its bit on climate change At the Hamburg group of 20 summit on 7-8 July, diplomats toiled through most of the night over US intransigence on climate change before they agreed on a joint communique that said: “The leaders of the other G20 members state that the Paris Agreement is…
I believe the government is counting too much on the RBI to wield the magic wand India’s economy is lurching like a car with two flat rear tyres. The monsoon has been better than expected: a bumper kharif crop is expected, and CRISIL says tractor sales could hit a record 650,000 in 2017-18. Consumer price…
What lies ahead? A messy GST rollout could be one shock too many after demonetisation… Finance Ministers take on a certain air when they think things are going swimmingly and nothing can rock the economy when it is cruising along. Even if all the lookouts are calling out to them to mind the shoals, they…
Modi has promised to double farmers’ incomes by 2022, but angry farmers have lost faith Two-thirds of Indians depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. As our farm crisis deepens, the government is tinkering around the edges by pushing irrigation, rural roads, and village electrification, distributing soil health cards, and offering crop insurance. It has done…
Death is inevitable, but not in a gas chamber He took a deep breath of air. Once again he caught a strangeness on the wind, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, neither odour nor perfume—just strange, and curiously exciting. “Superintendent, what’s that smell? Casey noticed it too, the moment Sven opened the door.’ Armstrong hesitated. Then he…
We need our institutions as much as we need our democracy Narendra Modi’s first term in office will be bracketed by malodorous stand-offs with two governors of the Reserve Bank of India. The bad blood between the central bank and the finance ministry is just one of the stains blotting the government’s copy-book as it…