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…
At least in the United States, the light of a free press still shines bright The Washington post adopted this four-word slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” in February 2017, its first in 140 years. It was used by its owner Jeff Bezos in an interview to the paper’s managing editor several months earlier, before Donald…
Independence Day is a good excuse for some economic chest-thumping. We should be proud that lndia is a free-enterprise democracy. Imagine the world’s burden if we were a basket case of 1.35 billion poor people. We may complain about inequality and the disproportionate number of billionaires, but it is possible to rise from rags to…
Importune your Maker, but not with impunity My family cracks up every time we watch Noises off, the rambunctious 1992 comedy. Maybe we find it funnier because we live in such a noisy nation. As India enters its 72nd year of freedom, we should declare independence from noise, and vow to liberate ourselves from religious…
Our government owns one of the world’s biggest databases. What does it mean? Annadata means “Bestower of food” – a synonym for god. In some Indian languages, Anna means older brother, so you can also take my headline as ‘Big Brother Data’. Not long ago there was spirited debate on whether or not’ data is…
Forget global warming and focus on local warnings Kanpur, Faridabad, Varanasi, Gaya, Patna, Delhi, Lucknow, Agra, Muzaffarpur. Nine of the world’s ten most polluted cities listed by the World Health Organization are in India. The Bharatiya Janata Party controls eight of them. Our politicians-ought to rise above the next election and make sure we do…
Strong, sustained growth is possible—if we don’t trip ourselves up We can hope that in the run-up to the next general election we will not suffer the type of jolts to our nervous systems that hit us in November 2016 and July 2017 with demonetisation and the introduction of the GST. “Those two shocks seem…
We can barely keep count of ourselves, leave alone migrants The Fates Of the four million people whose names did not appear in the ‘complete draft’ of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam hinge on whether they can (again try to) prove their identities. I spoke with several Assamese friends and experts, and…
Indians got the vote even before they got citizenship To be precise, 173,213,635 Voters aged 21 years or above. That was the total on the electoral rolls published, constituency by constituency, between the first week of September and 15th November, 1951, about a year before independent India’s first general election. The 1951 Census counted 180,307,684…
Will we get our act together, or continue to muddle in middle income mediocrity? So let’s see: 2018 is supposed to be a good year for India. We have low inflation, the monsoon may be normal, manufacturing is finally picking up , salarymen (and-women) are looking at good pay rises, and a litre of petrol…
Mere laws do not guarantee our youngest citizens a safe and healthy life The other day, I watched this video of four-year-old Jackson Drew reciting Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?) and marvelled a new at the infinite capacity of a child’s brain. I’m sure you’ve read that the pace…
Our history of Karnataka-style perfidy goes back a long way The wise ones among us are all ganit shastris (Mathematicians) and love crunching our election results which seem more frequent than our economic indicators. Politics is street theatre for us, and vote shares mean more than batting averages. A switch to simultaneous elections to parliament…
63 million ‘missing’ women: we need a pink revolution Look Carefully at all the Headlines, screaming or otherwise, that are popping up these days about corruption. How many of them feature women? Study after study has found over the years that more members of the ‘fairer sex’ in parliament and in the top echelons of…
The only antidotes to fake news are truth and commonsense Start exercise your smartphone thumb, because the next big election will be fought on our mobiles. The latest Internet and Mobile Association of India survey says 86.5 per cent of users access the Internet via mobiles and smartphones. That works out to over 430 million…
Like the clever taxpayer, it will wag the system There is no loophole that has not met an Indian taxpayer. A Hindi proverb says you can never straighten a dog’s tail (kutte ki poonch…). Don’t blame the poor soul who is using adaptation techniques that would put other evolutionary survivors to shame. The Smithsonian lists…
Time to stop being a semi-skilled nation In India if you book a plumber to come and rescue you from a flooded bathroom, chances are you will get a call at 11 a.m. the following day asking you to repeat your complaint or checking on directions to your address. If you sputter in rage, the…
Some day extraterrestrials will thrill to Raag Bhairavi in outer space Imagine there’s no countries / It isn’t hard to do Nothing to kill or die for / And no religion, too Imagine all the people / Living life in peace… …
Palliatives, pain-killers or band-aids: take your pick We are so frozen in the headlights of the on rushing slowdown that even a flicker leads us to believe that we have seen friendly djinns in the darkness. It is clear that Narendra Modi’s sixth year in power will be his worst in economics terms. The GDP…
ISRO is a case study of how to build a world class government institution Fifty years later, I vividly remember the grainy black-and-white television images of the giant gantries falling away like a spurned embrace as the giant Saturn V rocket lifted off, carrying three astronauts in a tiny cone on an audacious mission to…
How melting Himalayan glaciers and Chennai’s dry taps are connected Time was when ‘Glacial Speed’ used to mean ‘very, very slowly’. That has changed forever. We know that our planet is warming. New research shows conclusively that Himalayan glaciers are melting at an alarming rate. Interestingly, a major source in the study by a team…
Many anniversaries this year, but few happy ones This is a year of anniversaries , some unpleasant, some prescient, some momentous. CE 2019 is important not only because of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s crushing victory in the world’s biggest election – in many ways a more portentous event than Narendra Modi’s 2014 ascent to prime…
Merchandise, tourism, a board game, a biopic, a web series … If you want to decompress from the 2019 election campaign, and haven’t already donned the colours to be a cheering face in a shouting crowd at one of the prime minister’s rallies, then go to his website, which has a link to ‘NaMo Merchandise’.…
On Earth Day, let’s look at what our politicians promise on air pollution The Good news is that both the Bharatiya Janata Party and Congress seem to have finally woken up to the looming catastrophe of air pollution in our country. They are acknowledging its effects on our health, especially our children’s, by promising some…
The numbers are stupendous; will the results take our breath away too? The number are numbing. About 900 million Indians will be eligible to vote in this general election, and as The Hindu noted, this is more than the electorate in 36 of the world’s democracies combined. It is nearly eight per cent more than…
Social media –and mass media– fuel a horrific cycle of evil Psychopathy. Voyeurism. Sadism. Schadenfreude. Vicarious pleasure. Blood lust. You will find several terms to describe the human tendency to find a strange satisfaction, indeed fulfilment, in witnessing the pain and suffering of other people or creatures. If you gaze long enough into an abyss,…
Get set: Campaign 2019 will rivet, horrify and confound you For the second time in five years, I was struck by how apposite Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If’ is in relation to Narendra Modi. At one place it says: If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common…
Shutting Kanpur’s tanneries has not helped the Ganga much Hell for leather means to run very fast, but the leather industry in and around Kanpur has nowhere to run. Hundreds of tanneries and manufacturing units in Kanpur’s Jajmau quarter, and the clusters of Banthar and Unnau as you drive towards Lucknow, are tottering as they…