Reuter HONG KONG-North Korea said Monday that any plan to supply it with South Korean-style reactors could jeopardise its nuclear deal with the United States. According to the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), monitored by the British Broadcasting Corp., a North Korean foreign ministry spokesman quoted “foreign news reports” saying the United States,…
Both the ruling party and the main opposition party are embroiled in leadership disputes that could lead to party splits. Reuter SEOUL-South Korea’s main opposition party, locked in intense factional strife, was on the verge of a split Monday with its leader threatening to quit and form a new political group. The battle in the…
Reuter TAIPEI-Taiwan’s 7-Eleven chain store, friend to late-night shoppers and darling of foreign investors, is seeking to transfer its winning ways to a potentially huge market in China. President Chain Store Corp., a subsidiary of President Enterprises Corp., plans to list on Taiwan’s stock exchange in 1996 to raise money for its envisaged rapid growth,…
Reuter BEIJING-Chinese President Jiang Zemin used Monday’s visit by former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to rebuke Washington for interfering in internal Chinese affairs concerning Taiwan and Tibet. But Jiang, who is also Communist Party leader, also praised unspecified “important and positive progress” in bilateral ties over the past year, the Xinhua news agency…
Reuter LONDON-It must be one of the biggest regrets of Prince Charles’ life. He lost his chance for happiness with one woman, married the wrong one and now has an uphill struggle to get the public to accept his one-time girlfriend, the only real love of his life. Fresh out of university in 1970, the…
ATHENS In the good old days of the ancient Games, Olympia was the honorable playground of noble athletes, a theater of sacred peace, fair play and somber processions among white marble temples, right? Wrong. The ancient Games were loud, smelly, sometimes scandalous, every bit as political as their modern counterparts and once even saw a…
Reuters WASHINGTON – As the Secret Service widened its security perimeter around the White House, Vice President Dick Cheney was moved to the Camp David presidential retreat to ensure that America’s two senior officials were not in the same place, officials said. The step was taken Thursday amid concern about the possibility of new threats…
Reuters The French economy expanded in the second quarter at its weakest pace in two and a half years as the global economic slowdown chipped away at activity, the government said Tuesday. Growth in the second-largest economy in the 12-nation euro zone eased to 0.3 percent compared with the first quarter. when gross domestic product…
Reuters FRANKFURT – Talks on a takeover of Germany’s Reuters Commerzbank AG by UniCredito Italiano SpA fell apart Tuesday because of differences over valuation after shares in both banks fell sharply, the two sides said. The collapse is a blow to hopes for European cross- border banking consolidation and clouds the future of Commerzbank, Germany’s…
Reuters Following is a transcript of a videotaped statement by Osama bin Laden broadcast Sunday on Qatar-based Al Jazeera television: Here is America struck by God Almighty in on of its vital organs, so that its greatest Buildings are destroyed. Grace and gratitude to God. America has been filled with horror From north to south…
Reuters SOUSTONS, France President Mikhail S. Gorbachev said on Thursday that the Madrid peace conference had broken the ice between Middle East foes but that the international community must follow it up to ensure peace. “The ice was broken, we hope it will be completely broken,” he said here. M. Gorbachev was in southwest…
BERLIN – Germany has ruled out the possibility of shooting down hijacked passenger planes even if they appeared to threaten buildings with suicide attacks, the interior minister said Wednesday. “It isn’t helpful to consider this,” the minister, Otto Schily, told journalists. “How can I shoot down a passenger flight that comes near a skyscraper? I’m…
Reuters New York – Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir pleaded for American understanding in the hours before the Middle East peace conference opened, asking where Israelis would live if they traded land for peace. “It’s our land,” Mr. Shamir told CBS News in an interview in Madrid, where the conference began Wednesday. “How could we…
Berlin (Reuters) – Protected by the police and armed with a new court order, workers on Friday resumed the dismantling of Berlin’s giant Lenin statue, a survivor of the 1989 revolution that ended Communist rule in the former East Germany. Policemen scuffled earlier with 40 demonstrators who tried to prevent the workers from erecting…
Warsaw (Reuters) – President Lech Walesa of Poland will ask Bronislaw Geremek, a former Solidarity adviser and a leader of the Democratic Union party, to form a government, a presidential spokesman said Friday. “The president thinks Professor Geremek should start political consultations aimed at forming a government,” the spokesman, Andrzej Drzycimski, said by telephone…
Reuters LONDON – A rare edition of the first printed works of William Shakespeare made a brief appearance at the Globe Theatre here ahead of a sale next month where the book is expected to fetch up to $3 million. The leather-bound, 1,000-page compilation of plays was made in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death,…
Reuters JENIN, West Bank Israeli tanks moved into Palestinian-ruled Jenin early Wednesday and razed a Palestinian security headquarters in the heart of the West Bank city, which Israelis call a “terrorist nest.” The tanks withdrew after the two-hour operation. The raid came two days after a suicide bombing and amid a frustrating delay in convening…
Reuters Seoul – The crew of a South Korean ship is facing arrest for dumping the bodies of 25 Chinese illegal immigrants into the sea after they suffocated in a storage tank, police officials said Tuesday. The authorities were still searching for the corpses of the 25 immigrants, part of a group of 60…
Reuters Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia – The Yugoslav Navy on Wednesday searched a flotilla of Croatian relief boats for weapons before allowing it to pass through a blockade to the medieval port of Dubrovnik. The ferry Slavija, with the Yugoslav president, Stipe Mesic, aboard, was waiting at the eastern tip of Mljet Island for the fishing and…
Britain’s longest-serving member of Parliament, Tam Dalyell of the Labour Party, warned Prime Minister Tony Blair on Tuesday that he would unleash the most serious dissent among party members in decades if he supported a U.S. missile defense shield. (Reuters) A Swiss nurse who confessed in July to killing nine elderly women has admitted responsibility…
UNITED NATIONS, New York – The UN Security Council has voted unanimously to lift a three- year-old Yugoslavia, ending the last in a arms embargo on series of military and economic sanctions imposed on Belgrade during the past decade. The action Monday indicated the UN’s formal recognition that Yugoslavia has embraced democratic rule and has…
BERLIN – A senior figure in Germany’s Jewish community has attacked a proposal by a leading Christian Democrat to make national identity an election campaign issue. Michel Friedman, deputy leader of the Central Council of Jews in Germany and a Christian Democrat himself, told Radio Eins on Tuesday that stirring up nationalist sentiments before next…
BONN (Reuters) Germany, in a subtle conciliatory shift, said Monday it was striving to develop a cheaper version of the European Fighter Aircraft in agreement with its partners in the project: Italy, Britain and Spain. Bonn stunned its partners in July when it dropped out of the multi-billion dollar project’s production phase and said it…
MONROVIA, Liberia (Reuters) – Liberia’s Roman Catholic primate said at a requiem Mass on Monday for five American nuns that he held the rebel leader Charles Taylor responsible for their deaths. The missionaries from the Illinois-based Adorers of the Blood of Christ order disappeared about two weeks ago. Archbishop Michael Francis and other church officials,…
SEATTLE (Reuters)- A Boeing Co. spokesman said Monday that the engine lost from a 747 cargo plane on its approach to Luxembourg airport had apparently fallen off by design to prevent greater damage to the wing. The plane, belonging to the Luxembourg freight carrier Cargolux, landed safely Sunday, and none of the four crew members…
Reuters BEIJING – A Chinese court has awarded the family of a woman who died from AIDS a record $1.2 million after she was infected with tainted blood during a transfusion, official news organizations said Tuesday. A state-run hospital in the central province of Hubei was ordered to give Chen Xiumei’s husband Shen Jieyong…
Compiled by Our Staff From Dispatches New Delhi — Hindu and Muslim rioters burned and vandalized mosques, temples, homes and shops Friday in some of the worst violence to hit the capital this week. The nationwide death toll from the religious violence passed 1,000. As the police reported that three people had been killed…
RAMALLAH, Israeli-Occupied West Bank – Palestinians poured into the streets after their chief delegate’s speech at the Madrid peace talks on Thursday, decorating Israeli army jeeps with olive branches as smiling soldiers looked on. “We let the world hear our cause,” Nasser Ibrahim, a Palestinian who works in Israel, said after hearing a broadcast of…
HAVANA (Reuters) – The Labor Ministry has ordered managers at many companies to cut back production schedules, resulting in wage cuts of up to 30 percent, the Cuban news agency Prensa Latina said Thursday. Managers were ordered to revise operating schedules “taking into account the need to reduce cafeteria service at those labor centers experiencing…
PRAGUE (Reuters) – Traffic could increase by 1,000 percent on some European east-west routes in the next decade with the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, transport chiefs said here Thursday. They called for a policy to integrate road, rail, air and water transport to meet the needs of increased traffic throughout Europe while protecting…
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – A court on Thursday jailed four men for their role in the biggest art theft since World War II, Dutch radio said. The four Dutch nationals had pleaded guilty to stealing 20 works worth about $500 million from the Van Gogh Museum here last April 14. The paintings, which included “Potato Eaters,”…
Fighting Follows Attack on Opposition Chief Reuters KABUL – The Taleban has begun a major offensive north of the capital after suicide bombers tried to kill the movement’s key military opponent, anti-Taleban sources said Tuesday. The Taleban militia, which has denied any link with the attack Sunday on the guerrilla commander Ahmed Shah Massoud, had…
NEW YORK – Northwest Natural Gas Co, said Monday it would buy Enron Corp.’s Portland General Electric unit for $1.8 billion in a deal that would combine Oregon’s largest natural gas utility with the state’s largest electric utility. The deal, which is subject to regulatory approval, is expected to close by the fourth quarter of…
by Chaitanya Kalbag, Reuter, in Bhopal Hundreds of people stand outside the drab white bungalow, clutching yellow X-ray folders and medical prescriptions in a line stretching down the driveway flanked by dry, leafless bushes. A chorus of dry coughs punctuates the slow progress of emaciated men, ragged children and ghost-like Muslim women covered head-to-toe in…
JERUSALEM – Roger G. Harrison, the U.S. ambassador to Jordan, was injured Monday is an automobile collision on the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road, the Israeli police said. A woman in another car was killed. The police said Mr. Harrison was undergoing surgery at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. A police spokeswoman said three other men in the…
ANKARA-Car bombs killed an American serviceman and seriously injured an Egyptian diplomat here Monday in attacks directed at the Middle East peace conference. A group calling itself Turkish Islamic Jihad took responsibility and said the attacks were to protest the US-sponsored Middle East peace conference that opens in Madrid Wednesday, the Anatolian News Agency reported. …
Chaitanya Kalbag takes over as Editor-in-Chief of all editions of the Hindustan Times today. Kalbag brings with him extensive global experience in journalism. His last assignment was with Reuters where he was managing editor and head of editorial operations for Asia since 2000. He joined Reuters in 1983 and worked in several countries-including Hong Kong,…
Govt’s fiscal profligacy has made a mockery of the FRBM Act The government’s fiscal profligacy has made a mockery of the FRBM Act. Pranab Mukherjee sounded pleased earlier this week when he told a TV interviewer that India’s projected fiscal deficit of 6.8 per cent of GDP in 2009-10 was still better than the 11…
Apologising is never easy. Barack Obama knows this now. He made a non-apology apology last week to a Massachusetts police sergeant two days after saying the officer “acted stupidly” in arresting Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr because he was trying to break into his own house. Obama’s decision to wade into a local issue…
“Curiouser and curiouser” sums up India’s economy. There is little or no credit, tepid business and consumer confidence, exports are struggling, and yet gross domestic product (GDP) grew by a healthy 7.7 percent in the January-March quarter, and is seen rising by 7.4 percent in fiscal 2018-19. If you read the Reserve Bank of India’s…
The sub-text to the debate on simultaneous elections is that BJP wants to further centralise power. In 2012, watching Manmohan Singh struggling with a disorderly coalition, an obstreperous cabinet, and a host of powerful state chief ministers, I wrote that he was the lone prime minister in a nation of presidents. In 2014, on the…
One of the smartest things Prime Minister Narendra Modi did after coming to power four years ago was to appoint diehard loyalists as state governors. They were either beholden to him or to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) or the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). When the Congress was on top of the heap, it routinely…
Can momentum towards holding simultaneous elections to Lok Sabha, state assemblies be achieved in one fell swoop? The momentum towards holding simultaneous elections to the Lok Sabha and state assemblies is growing, but can this be achieved in one fell swoop? If it is done in stages, it may take until 2024 at least to…
India boasts some of the best strategic brains in the world. But have we come up with a national consensus on how to tackle terror? Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack…
Perhaps Kinsey would have an exhilarating time if he were to conduct a survey among young Indian men on their sexual fears and phobias. We have a long way to go before we attain the permissiveness of the West, say some wise men. But what strikes any observer is the fact that. more than thirty…
Thimphu, Bhutan (Reuter) — “Do not give pens, sweets or medicine to villagers,” warns a Bhutanese government guidebook for tourists. The writer has ventured to the secretive Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, where less than 2,000 visitors are permitted to visit each year, to report on the country, its people and its young bachelor king. For…
This week CHAITANYA KALBAG takes off on Sasthi Brata’s best-selling novel “Confessions of an Indian Woman-Eater”. Vrata is one of those typical Indians who have followed in Nirad Chaudhuri’s footsteps: the man who lives off dishwashing in some seedy Gulf restaurant while writing home about the cushy job he’s got, working in pile-carpeted comfort. …
Fortnightly Take off on Bestsellers A short, spicy travelogue-cum-novel, “Train To Uzbekhistan” is replete with descriptions of the locomotive that hauls the assortion of bogies, one of which holds Dukhwant Singh. The author has drawn obvious inspiration from Agatha Christie and we find him attempting half-heartedly to describe the distribution of the compartments, just like…
A newspaper cartoonist once went into deep Africa and found that some German scientists had frozen to death a scant hundred miles from the equator. He came back to America and told his readers. Robert Leroy Ripley also told them a lot of other things that they found rather difficult to believe. In the process…
Hovel is another masterpiece in analytical fiction by Bailey, whose previous successes included Hangar Zero Nine and Tyres. The book measures 11 cms by 18 cms, is printed on glazed 20 Ibs paper and is set in Monotype Garamond. The blurb on the jacket tells you that Bailey is a master at looking into…
I’ve been seeing too many Hindi movies. Talk about the bus system, or the weather, or your television set, and I prefer to opt out. But initiate a debate on the Relative Physiques Of Hindi Heroines, and I can walk away with the Dale Carnegie plaque. Which is why a lot of friends advised me,…
The Buns of Camerone is MacFat’s sixth book. The dust-jacket says it’s a thriller in the true Fleming Le Carre tradition. I would prefer to call it a thriller. it combines the preposterousness of a thriller with the eleventh-hour look of a filler. If you are ignorant of what ‘filler’ means, ask the nearest journalist. …
Take a dash of Proust and add a few drops of Sartre. Mix with a tablespoon of Ezekiel and set mixture in front of Vrinda Nabar on TV screen. When half-baked, sprinkle some grated poetry and simmer at the Jehangir Art Gallery, Garnish with scraps of leftist doctrines and dress with chopped Charminars. Add Nirad…
Our fourth bestseller take-off this fortnight is the controversial ‘Freedom at Midnight’, a book that sold the maximum hardcover editions in India in the past ten years. SLAVERY AT NOON by Harry Rollins and Feminique Rapierre. Published by Lucas. 555 pages, Rs. 55. The authors attempt to present fiction as pulp history. Rollins and…
Gone are the days of traffic jams on Thursday evenings when everyone rushed home to see Chhaya Geet. Gone also are the days when Kamleshwar spent hours telling us why the trains were not back on the tracks. Now it’s only affluent sons who buy TV sets so their parents can spend the evenings at…
One evening twenty years ago in Puttaparti, a village in Andhra Pradesh, a 60 year old man lay close to death. As his wife and daughter looked on anxiously his breathing became erratic and he went into a coma. An hour later, his body began to turn cold and the relatives clustered around his bedside,…
With a step forward from Monarchy to a Republic, Iran has taken two steps backwards: restricting freedom, curbing women’s right and executions after summary trials. “Who would believe that I should work 10 hours a day for 37 years to help my country only to see it go back to the point where I began?”…
Nothing seems to work right in Manipur, and a combination of corruption, misgovernment, and unemployment, compounded by the continuing presence of the Army and various paramilitary forces, is fuelling the people’s frustration and aiding their drift towards rebellion. At first sight, Imphal is cloaked in quietude. It looks more like a small town than the…
“War is the highest form of struggle for resolving contradictions when they have developed to a certain stage, between classes, nations, states or among political groups, and it has existed ever since the emergence of private property and of classes.” —Mao Zedong Is China helping insurgents in Manipur, Nagaland and Mizoram with arms and ideological…
But the people have their ways of making do Close to one-sixth of Iran’s population of 38 million lives in Teheran, the sprawling capital that slides southward from the cold slopes of an Elborz Mountains spur. And Teheran was trying, in the weeks I spent there, with a touch of grouchiness, to look like a…
The violence and the passions that have unleashed a caste war in Gujarat have found sympathetic onlookers in Tamil Nadu. These onlookers may not remain passive: they are already contemplating demonstrations of support for the anti-reservationists in Gujarat. “If it’s necessary, we’ll all go to Gujarat and join the agitation,” bursts out Mrs. Bagalakumari…
Not because it wants to solve the foreigners issue In Assam, a Chief Minister who is unpopular in her own party is being kept on, a minority government is being propped up, and the powers that be seem uninterested in solving the foreigners issue. In Manipur, the Assembly has been suspended while the Congress(I) works…
Iran is ruled by many Shahs today, each wearing Islam’s robes that cloak the terror they replaced The most intense patriotism usually flourishes in the rear lines,” wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago about Russia at war with Nazi Germany. Not so in post-revolution Islamic Iran. Four months after “Allah’s victorious forces” locked horns…
The ‘poverty line’ is assumed to be consumption of Rs 65 per capita per month in rural areas and Rs 75 in urban areas at 1977-78 prices. On this basis in 1977-78, 306 million people in India were living below the ‘poverty line’, of whom 249 million were in rural areas and 57 million in…
The first spark flew on 6 June. A Bengali shopkeeper at Lembucchara, 8 km from Agartala, lent a tribal friend of his a dao (sickle) to cut a pineapple with. Joking about the sickle’s blunt edge, the tribal tossed it back to the shopkeeper. It hit another tribal standing close by, wounding him negligibly. But…
The kisans got a free ride, and helped give the Congress(l) a lift Never had so many people gained so little from so heralded an event as the Kisan Rally in Delhi on 16 February. Estimates of the crowd gathered on the Rajpath lawns ranged from 2.5 million by Delhi Police Commissioner PS Bhinder to…
Poorly paid, snowed under by a huge backlog of pending cases, buffeted by the government’s attempts to manipulate judicial processes and appointments, our judiciary has not been able to preserve its independence. At the same time, our Constitution has been considerably tampered with by the legislature. What are the causes of this state of ,…
The ten-week-old agitation against reservations in Gujarat which has so far claimed 30 lives, is the second most serious agitation of its kind in the country since the Constitution was adopted in 1950. The first was in Bihar in 1978; it took 30 lives. Tamil Nadu is preparing to launch a similar agitation soon. While…
Four and a half years after it was struck by a terrible accident in which 375 miners died, the Chasnalla colliery is nowhere near being re-opened. Nor are the dead miners’ families in sight of a lasting solution for their problems. The road to Chasnalla is not an easily forgettable experience. The geography is that…
Rehabilitating the Chasnalla victims families has proved to be an on-going task. The Indian Iron and Steel Company’s welfare officers at Chasnalla wear a perpetually harassed look. Every day their offices are mobbed by complainants: relatives who allege desertion by widows who allege cheating by their dead husbands relatives; it is a noisy scene. fuelled…
“Chasnalla was unique”, said a civil servant in Patna. “The government moved very fast in rehabilitating the victims’ families. There were few delays, little red tape.” Had the government .set up a cell to monitor rehabilitation, to take follow-up action? “No,” said the civil servant, crestfallen. In Ranchi we met the legendary KB Saxena…
How Madras became India’s film capital The next time you are talking about Indian films, don’t let your tongue slip into saying “the Bombay film industry” No longer is Bombay India’s film capital. In 1979, less Hindi films were produced than in Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam. The Censors in Madras can barely keep up with…
What is the current state of youth politics? Every youth organisation is dominated by the parent party and suffers from the prejudices of old politicians. Every youth organisation is dormant most of the time but takes to street warfare when roused. Youth politics are only a youthful version of the rot that has eaten into…
Has anything changed in the two Bihar villages that hit the headlınes? Six kilometres from Harnaut, the jeep broke down in the mud. The slipper-shod lady decided to continue her journey on elephant-back. Perched dangerously behind her and the mahout was another lady, a member of Parliament. It took the elephant three hours to reach…
‘One hears the echoes of the movement for an independent Bangladesh in Assam today’, said a Dacca newspaper recently. The situation in Assam and the north-east is as difficult as it is complex. Although decades of political and economic indifference have pushed the Assamese into their present agitation, the movement has already acquired dangerous colours…
Three documents seem to indicate that the Assam problem is not about to be easily solved. Intractable and increasingly aggressive, the Assam agitation last fortnight edged closer to ugly confrontation. The deadline for a Central government decision on the foreigners issue set by the All Assam Students Union (AASU) and the Gana Sangram Parishad (GSP)…
There is some spectacular courting in this unique hotel in Delhi Western Court, an official hostelry in the heart of New Delhi, epitomises the decay of our political .system. It has become a classic symbol of everything that is corrupt, debauched and venal in our political life. Gossip about Western Court exploded into lurid fact…
It could have been a coincidence, but on 18 October Dr Basanti Dulal Nag Chaudhuri, ex-vice-chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University, was in Geneva; Dr Vidya Prakash Dutt, former pro-vice-chancellor of Delhi University and presently a nominated member of the Rajya Sabha and head of the department of Chinese and Japanese studies at Delhi University, was…
A thriller is the sort of book that you take to bed with you and then read on through the night, impatient that the pages aren’t turning fast enough. The sort of book whose ending you are tempted to read in the beginning just so that the agony of not knowing what happens or whodunit…
A line was crossed this Dussehra when Doordarshan broadcast the Vijaya Dashami speech by Mohan Madhukar Bhagwat, the Sarsanghachalak of the Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). That line divided the state and religion in India. We do not have a state religion, and we are not a religious state like Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia, or Iran.…
Oh, what a glorious thing democracy is! If you add the number of festivals, weekends, hours spent in bad traffic, and election days in a typical working-age Indian’s life, chances are that she or he is beavering away for less than half the year. If we just had elections to all our state assemblies and…
Sikh love Muslim love Sikh It is difficult to judge Indian writing in English, saturated as it often is with the smells, sights and sounds of the ethos it springs from. Punjabi writing in English is a case in point. It carries strong overtones of the earthiness and directness of the people of that region.…
Just as a man casts off his old clothes only to wear new ones, says the Bhagvadgita, so does a man die only to be reborn. Somewhat the same kind of samsara was prescribed for this magazine, New Delhi. It was born in September 1978 and had six issues published. Though it did not die,…
“Our nation’s biggest problem is that we who sit in government think nobody knows more than us, nobody is more honest than us, and nobody cares more about the nation than us. This is wrong. We have to trust 1.25 billion Indians. The government cannot run on suspicions,” Narendra Modi told an audience on Thursday,…
For prime minister Narendra Modi, 2015 has been an annus horribilis, bracketed by the Bhartiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) waiting loss in the Delhi elections in February, and now the even more humiliating and momentous loss in Bihar. Bihar has been bruited about, mainly by the BJP, as a referendum on Modi’s popularity. Modi heavily invested…
Says the self-opinionated master. But he is also first-rate. I’m a very well known painter. I don’t care for those stultified art critics. It’s you ‘unknowledgeables’ – who can reach out on our behalf.” The ego behind that ‘well known painter’ remark is evident as is Biren De’s scorn for things conventional, and his voluminous…
NEW DELHI — Of all Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s campaigns, none, perhaps, is more consequential than the renewed push for his Swachh Bharat — or Clean India — Mission launched in October 2014. At first glance SBM was a mere rehash of a campaign to build toilets across rural India that was launched…
NEW DELHI — Political stability in India paved the way for root-and-branch reforms such as demonetization and the new Goods and Services Tax. But as one of the country’s key economic advisers acknowledged, they came at a cost: subdued growth this year that could extend into 2018. “I think in the last year or so…
NEW DELHI — Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s announcement Monday of a $2.5 billion program to take electricity to 40 million of India’s poorest households bore all the hallmarks of his recent economic policies. Two-thirds of the way into his five-year term, Modi is pushing a propoor, populist agenda that could win votes for his Bhartiya…
Despite apparent success, trouble spots range from growing corporate debt to sluggish job creation Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi waves to people as he leaves after inaugurating the annual meeting of the African Development Bank in Gandhinagar, India on May 23. © AP As Prime Minister Narendra Modi celebrates his third anniversary in power on…
Key state Uttar Pradesh is a political lynchpin: it sends the maximum number of representatives (80) to parliament’s lower house. It was home to nine of India’s 15 prime ministers. Modi, who forsook his own western state of Gujarat to win a parliamentary seat from Uttar Pradesh’s Hindu holy city of Varanasi in 2014, said…
Startup reaches for the moon in global competition NEW DELHI — Just after Christmas this year, the spindly Team Indus Spacecraft, weighing 210 kg, will be shot into lunar orbit atop a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle. The rocket will blast off from the Indian Space Research Organization’s range on Srihari Kota Island in southeastern India.…
India’s Modi seeks to balance populism and fiscal prudence as risks mount Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi likes taking big steps and does not shy away from wagering his political capital. But he squandered quite a bit of it with his November demonetization measures, which banned 500 and 1,000 rupee bank notes. Modi was…
No ‘big bang’ reforms but budget tries to be all things to all people Speaking after the budget was tabled in parliament, Modi said it took solid steps to fulfil the dreams of the poor. He coined a new acronym, FUTURE (farmers, underprivileged, transparency, urban rejuvenation, rural development and employment generation) to explain his goals. …
Separately, an Asset Quality Review ordered by Rajan to attack crisis levels of bad loans made by state-owned banks and an accompanying crackdown on ‘willful defaulters’ among oligarchs in the infrastructure sector who have borrowed recklessly for stalled projects may have earned Rajan too many powerful and politically connected enemies. Businessmen opposed to the…
Indian markets, already skittish over Britain’s Brexit referendum, now must deal with the surprise announcement on June 18 by Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Raghuram Rajan that he is stepping down when his three-year term ends on September 4. Tough, uncompromising and outspoken, Rajan, 53, appeared to be doing budget signs everything that…
In its Oct. 4 report, the RBI appeared to highlight the upside risk of inflation. It said that its September survey of household expectations saw inflation at 9.5% three months ahead and 11.4% a year ahead, driven mainly by higher food and healthcare costs. RBI staff forecast CPI averaging 5.3% in the fourth (Jan-March) quarter…
Urjit Patel’s first press conference as governor of the Reserve Bank of India on Oct. 4 was notable for several reasons. The new keeper of India’s monetary flame, just shy of his 53rd birthday, was ill at ease. Very clearly the antithesis of his loquacious predecessor Raghuram Rajan, Patel’s “media interaction” lasted all of 20…
Will demonetization vacuum up all the black money? Economists believe most illicit, untaxed funds would be diverted into buying gold or real estate; indeed, gold imports spiked in the days immediately following the announcement. But will India ever be cashless? A Nomura Securities report said that India’s cash-to-gross domestic product ratio was high at…
Every Indian banknote carries two reassuring messages: “Guaranteed by the central government,” and above the signature of the governor of the Reserve Bank of India, the words: “I promise to pay the bearer the sum of … rupees.” At midnight on Nov. 8, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi used an executive fiat to extinguish both…