When I’m sixty-four Give me your answer, fill in a form Mine for evermore Will you still need me Will you still feed me When I’m sixty-four? Average life expectancy at birth for Indians in 2010 was 64.4 years, which means the Beatles song could be an elegy. We fared more poorly than our neighbors,…
Chaitanya Kalbag, Reuters The Philippine economy is expected to continue to grow in 1987 after a modest upturn in 1986, but a major revival depends on an end to political uncertainty, bankers, economists, diplomats and businessmen said. Economic Planning Minister Solita Monsod has said the gross national product (GNP) grew 0.13% in 1986 after declining…
India’s ex-prime minister says the nation needs a unified approach to fuel growth LEFT: Supporters of India’s main opposition Congress party attend a protest against what they say is a rise in the prices of essential food items and fuel in Ahmedabad in June. RIGHT: India’s former prime minister Manmohan Singh (blue turban) and main…
Reuters News Service MANILA — The Philippines, once Southeast Asia’s second-richest nation but now its second-poorest, claims it is poised for an economic boom in 1987 after three years of precipitous decline that has drained millions in poverty. Government officials, buoyed by rising foreign exchange reserves and single-digit inflation, have begun the new year on…
Government pushes for monetary easing despite central bank doubts While India swelters in record high June temperatures, senior officials in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government are sweating for another reason. The heat is coming from a debate over whether the country is poised for a V-shaped recovery after last November’s shock demonetization or if it…
NEW DELHI — India’s economy is doing well despite slower growth in the first quarter of fiscal 2016-17, but moribund private investment and a mushroom cloud of huge bad loans over banks are worries, according to the chief economic adviser to the Indian government. “In the short run, our biggest challenges are private investment and…
Government must create jobs, not just offer cash: renowned Indian economist NEW DELHI — Narendra Modi’s government unveiled an ambitious budget last week with huge handouts for India’s poor, a move that could certainly win him votes in the upcoming elections but will do little to alleviate poverty in the long term, analysts said. Modi’s…
Indian bank governance is in the spotlight amid the ballooning $2.1 billion fraudulent-loan scandal at Punjab National Bank. © Reuters NEW DELHI – The crisis in India’s state-owned banking sector is deepening, but the government may be preparing to give a key oversight body, set up two years ago to improve governance at bank boards,…
These are extraordinary times and we witness extraordinary phenomena. Three weeks before the Union Budget, when finance ministers customarily crawl under their carapaces, the honourable Member of Parliament from Sivaganga delivered a rousing speech on national security. What he said, with feeling and not a little frustration, was that Indians seem to disdain economic growth.…
Many of us are making our fortunes elsewhere John Denver’s 1969 Rendition of this song is famous, but my heartstrings are tugged more by the Peter, Paul and Mary version of 1967. That was just two years after the Hart-Celler Act amended America’s immigration laws and flipped around the overwhelmingly white, European tide to let…
The RBI governor refuses to be drawn into the game of popularity stakes Well, I think we’ve still to get to a place where we feel satisfied. We have this saying, ‘in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. We’re a little bit that way. We feel things are turning to the…
The text message from the finance ministry went out close to midnight on Sunday. October 28, hardly a time when the ministry is expected to be working, the message informed its journalist recipients that Finance Minister P. Chidambaram would address the media less than 12 hours later. The subject of the interaction was not disclosed. With that began a sequence of…
A $5 trillion economy is a stretch. Do we have the running legs? In 2018, India’s per-capita GDP was $2,015.60, according to the World Bank. This makes sense — our economy is currently sized at $2.7 trillion, and our population is around 1.35 billion. This is considerably behind the US ($62,641), and not even a…
India is walking into a middle-income trap with its eyes wide open The good news is that every. body — the IMF was the latest to fall in line on Tuesday — agrees with the RBI that India’s GDP growth rate will be a modest 7% in 2019-20. The 0.3 percentage point reduction in its…
Does this festive season herald fireworks or damp squibs? It is amazing how things come around. I was listening to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Houston speech. After speaking in several Indian languages, Modi said, “Maine itna hi kaha hai: Everything is fine.” Suddenly, I remembered the theme song from 3 Idiots. Eight years have gone…
Modi has been handed a blank cheque. He must ensure it doesn’t bounce Narendra Modi’s pulverising victory has wiped out every semblance of opposition in Parliament’s lower house. The Congress’ humiliation is so total that it will fail to be recognised as the main Opposition party in the Lok Sabha for the second time in…
The government is performing a risky high-wire balancing act Let me put it simply: the government is performing two balancing acts simultaneously. In order to get to this perilous position, it has time and again turned precedent on its head, laying it open for the next administration to also throw caution to the winds. This…
The truth is, India isn’t rich enough to be a welfare state William Safire must be turning in his grave. The language maven and Richard Nixon speechwriter came up with the ‘nattering nabobs of negativism” phrase that US Vice- President Spiro Agnew used in a 1970 speech. Finance minister Arun Jaitley first used ‘nawabs of…
Be Careful what you digest from the result of the assembly elections I like only one kind of fudge and one kind of shake, the chocolate kind. And I especially dislike fudges and shakes of the economic kind. The Narendra Modi government, by no means on its last legs, has treated us to quite a…
This government’s been raising expectations, not the economy The government’s ‘Saaf Niyat, Sahi Vikas’ (Clean Intent, Right Development) campaign is expectation management in an election year. Nineteen months after demonetisation, we still do not have a final count for the total volume of banned currency notes returned to the nation’s banks. Are we really a…
The prime minister’s speech at the World Economic Forum was sweeping and aspirational (one observer said he was “preaching to the choir”). He presented India as the most attractive investment destination in the world, with its democracy, its young population, its diversity and the headroom it has in catching up with the West’s levels of…
As we chatted over our morning cups of tea, glancing at the dailies and their dose of grim news, and trying to balance the latest perfidies visited upon us by pondering over the good things happening in our lives as well, my wife uttered one of her bon mots: “Isn’t it interesting how we Indians…
On Tuesday came news that India’s exports contracted for the first time in 13 months in October: Our trade deficit has widened to a near three-year high of $86 billion. Ready-made garment exports in October shrank 39% from a year earlier to $829.44 million. Apparel exports in April-October 2017 totalled $10 billion, rising just two…
In his book ‘How the BJP Wins’, Prashant Jha describes how Narendra Modi has led the Bharatiya Janata Party to near-invincibility by transmogrifying himself again and again over the past decade and a half. “If he was a Hindu Hriday Samrat (Emperor of Hindu Hearts) from 2002, Modi carefully transitioned into a vikas purush, the…
Those of us in our sixties, including our prime minister, will remember the goli soda. You used a little wooden gizmo to push in a marble stuck in the mouth of a bottle and guzzled the sweet, fizzy drink with the marble dancing around inside. Then you felt full and happy. But it was mostly…
Cabinet reshuffles seem to generate more excitement than the announcement of cricket teams. So we know what the best game in town is. We knew weeks earlier that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was going to re-order his squad after the end of parliament’s monsoon session. By Saturday, everybody and her sister knew exactly who was…
“Tis the season for chest-thumping. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is unquestionably on top of the heap. But what a heap it is. Over the past couple of weeks, quite a bit of nasty triumphalism has been on display. Such eruptions need a trigger, and a handy one was provided by the departing remarks of…
“August is the month of revolution,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in his monthly radio talk a few days ago. Wednesday was the 75th anniversary of the launch of the Quit India movement against British colonial rule, and Modi talked about the five-year journey from sankalp (intention) to siddhi (achievement) to independence in August 1947. …
In early June, a few weeks before the launch of the Goods and Services Tax (GST), Prime Minister Narendra Modi held an informal meeting with a group of senior bureaucrats at which, according to a government press release, he exhorted them to rise above the “administrative mechanisms of earlier centuries”. He urged them to seize…
Right now, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has the option to strengthen governance, really start to fix the country’s major economic problems, and reinforce our institutions The more you study India’s history the more you have to marvel at our infinite capacity to fight among ourselves. Ashoka, the last of the great Mauryan emperors, fought the…
In China, our difficult and, to many of us, menacing neighbour, they say “If you speak a lot you are more likely to say something wrong; if you speak less you are less likely to say something wrong; and if you do not speak at all, you will not say anything wrong. In Confucian thought,…
This ‘epoch-making’ transformation in indirect taxes has been anything but rapid. Modi & Jaitley are standing on shoulders of several PM-FM pairs of reformers Midnight has an eerie and slightly occult hold on our imaginations. It is the hour when magic is supposed to take place, when the old falls away and a new day…
How many different kinds of evidence do we need to convince ourselves that the economy is slowing dramatically? Consumer price index (CPI) inflation fell to 2.2% in May, but that was put down by facile analysis to plunging food prices and a good monsoon. The Index of Industrial Production (IIP) base year has been moved…
Aa no bhadraha Krikava yantu vishwataha (Let noble thoughts come to us from all sides). It seems fitting to look ahead at 2017 with this 3,500-year-old invocation from the Rig Veda as we try to see beyond the seismic waves of change that came at us over the past twelve months. Terrorism. Syria. Aleppo. Brexit.…
Ernest Hemingway wrote more than once for the Toronto Daily Star on the absurdity and tragedy of German hype-rinflation after the Treaty of Versailles sealed Germany’s defeat in World War I. In a September 1922 report, he described how he and his wife exchanged 90 US cents for 670 marks on a visit to the…
In the preface to his 1995 book ‘How Good People Make Tough Choices’, ethicist Rushworth M. Kidder wrote that when he interviewed twenty-two leading thinkers around the world about the challenges, they saw looming in the 21st century, six themes stood out. Five of them were not surprising: the nuclear threat, environmental degradation, the North-South…
Early this week I attended a talk on Nation Branding by David Reibstein, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School. Nation branding is the perception people have of a country, whether they visit it, buy from it, or invest in it. For their 2016 Best Countries report, Reibstein and his associates surveyed 16,200 business…
I woke up before dawn today to an email from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s office. It listed his major activities over the previous week. He had been typically busy: just before he left for Hangzhou, where he chaired a special BRICS meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit, Modi granted a soft-focus television interview…
Spain has embraced and subsumed its Islamic past, and this holds lessons for India, where we are debasing our historical sites- a few month ago the Taj Mahal was seen turning green literally… History is fascinating. It always circles around. A lot of history is about culture and knowledge. It is also about the gaining…
And time yet for a hundred indecisions. And for a hundred visions and revisions—TS Eliot And time yet to revel in a plentiful monsoon, never mind that food prices continue to rise, and tomatoes now cost more than Rs 100 a kilo. There have been several good government decisions in the past few weeks. Reforms…
Modi can smoothly segue from pugnacious to presidential, and after two years of his ubiquitousness he can even appear statesmanlike in comparison with U.S. presidential hopeful Donald Trump and Rodrigo Duterte, the president-elect of the Philippines. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks to a joint session of the U.S. Congress on June 8, he will…
While we listlessly wait in century-high temperatures for the slightly delayed monsoon, listening to Minister X or Bureaucrat Y talking up the numbers, the question again is: Who are you trying to impress? Life’s but a walking shadow,a poor playerThat struts and frets his hour upon the stageAnd then is heard no more: it is…
It says something for the Congress that Sonia Gandhi has been its president for nearly 18 years, a longer, unbroken stretch than anybody in the family she married into. Night after night on our TV screens, the usual suspects, aging Congress leaders, pick apart the chicken entrails of this middleman’s diary entry or that arms…
Three years of Abenomics and nationalism have not put any vim or vigour into the Japanese economy. Nor are Nationalism and loyalty preventing the Chinese economy’s slide. XI, like Modi, also want too root out corruption. “In trust we God” was emblazoned on the back of a truck roaring past us on an Indian highway.…
The sheer size of our population will continue to power domestic demand for some time, but India cannot hope to be a heavyweight global player without taking ever-bigger bites of the world trade pie. Sadly, alongside falling two-way trade, India has turned increasingly protectionist The world around us grows more uneasy by the day about…
To be truly remembered in history books, Narendra Modi will have to parlay his interpersonal skill to work his way through his bucket list I don’t know how many people noticed this tweet from the Prime Minister’s Office on November 19: “External Affairs Minister@ Sushma Swaraj ji is present at Delhi airport to receive PM…
“When the old mother received the body of her child, which the neighbours had brought back to her, she did not cry, but she stayed there for a long time motionless, watching him. Then, stretching her wrinkled hand over the body, she promised him a vendetta.” So run these chilling words from a 19th-century story…
Over the past week, I have been struck by the helplessness of the men leading the world’s two biggest democracies. There is a major difference, though: President Barack Obama has tried, and failed, to change America’s gun control laws as one mass shooting is followed closely by another. After last week’s massacre at an Oregon…
“The agenda focused on measures to correct the current account deficit, counter rupee depreciation and its impact on trade and industry, improve skill development and focus on developing industrial corridors,” one newspaper said about the prime minister’s brainstorming meeting. “The overall sentiment was to convert decisions to action and take back the country to a…
We are hopefully in the last of this summer’s dog days, and Sirius (or Svana as it is known in Hindu astrology) will glow a little less brilliantly in the hot night sky. Dog days are said to induce all sorts of mental upheaval, agitation, and unpleasantness. Perhaps that is why much of Europe wisely…
Perhaps it is because every tremor registers as an earthquake on social media, but we seem besieged by one ‘not again’ moment after another. Whether it is suspect instant noodles or larvae-infested baby food or lecherous taxi drivers, is India simply predisposed towards badness, or are we just too much of a glass-half-empty nation? Let’s…
One of my prized possessions is a fossilised limpet, a kind of sea snail that attaches itself very, very tightly to rocks. The fossil must be hundreds of thousands of years old. It must have been prised off a rock with some force, the kind that is trying to get many of our privileged leaders…
The PMO website is taking on the busyness of Modi’s own website. Within hours of Munde’s death, the list of cabinet ministers was updated with a blank space next to the ministries of rural development… If you believe in signs and omens, all the days and dates this year coincide with 1947, our year of…
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.- Julius Caesar, Act 1 By Wednesday elections had been held for 438 seats, or four-fifths of the 16th Lok Sabha, and it seemed like a good point to draw breath and take stock of the men and women who…
The good news is that everybody– the International Monetary Fund was the latest to fall in line on Tuesday– agrees with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) that India’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate will be a modest 7% in 2019-20. The 0.3 percentage point reduction in its forecast is because of “a weaker-than-expected…
The prime minister’s speech at the World Economic Forum was sweeping and aspirational (one observer said he was “preaching to the choir”). He presented India as the most attractive investment destination in the world, with its democracy, its young population, its diversity and the headroom it has in catching up with the West’s levels of…
They say the best way to persuade somebody is to plant an idea in their head and get them to start speaking about it as if it were their idea. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has shown he is a great persuader. Persuasion is one thing: what about implementation? Over the past four years, the Bharatiya Janata…
The government’s ‘Saaf Niyat, Sahi Vikas’ (Clean Intent, Right Development) campaign is expectation management in an election year. Nineteen months after demonetisation, we still do not have a final count for the total volume of banned currency notes returned to the nation’s banks. Are we really a less-cash economy now? Authorities had to scramble to…
Earlier this month the United Nations issued its first set of ‘diya’ postage stamps to mark Diwali and the triumph of good over evil. It was a nice gesture (and I possess a sheet of the stamps) but a reminder of the continuing conundrum of why India punches far below its weight in the world’s…
Let me put it simply: the government is performing two balancing acts simultaneously. In order to get to this perilous position, it has time and again turned precedent on its head, laying it open for the next administration to also throw caution to the winds. This is not good for a country of our size.…
In 2018, India’s per-capita gross domestic product (GDP) was $2015.60, according to the World Bank. This makes sense– our economy is currently sized at $2.7 trillion, and our population is around 1.35 billion. This is considerably behind the United States ($62,641) and not even a fourth of China’s $9,770.80. The Bank’s data show that India’s…
It is amazing how things come around. I was listening to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Houston speech. After speaking in several Indian languages, Modi said: “Maine itna hi kaha hai: Everything is fine.” Suddenly, I remembered the theme song from 3 Idiots. Eight years have gone by and the lyrics could have been written today.…
Islamabad’s response to request for cooperation on Mumbai blasts will test the commitment given in Havana Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said on Tuesday that Pakistan would have to prove that it was serious about joining hands with India in cracking down on terrorism, and the first test was the Mumbai train explosion findings. “How else…
…says Bhagwati, feels it is a fallacy to think our farmers would be swamped by global competition; wants India to be ready for freer trade in farm sector They call economics a dismal science, but it need not be so when Dr Jagdish Bhagwati discusses it. The Columbia professor, who has long been a frontrunner…
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…
“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…
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 ‘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…
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…
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…
Modi’s war on black money has hit India’s economy. Is the price worth paying? One month after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the demonetization of 500 and 1,000-rupee banknotes in his battle against black money, policymakers in New Delhi are finally starting to acknowledge that the shock move has caused immense upheavals, loss…
Not surprisingly for a country obsessed with politics and gossip, the appointment of India’s new central bank chief has already spawned reams of newsprint and hours of television talk-time on what makes Urjit Ravindra Patel tick. Two words sum up Patel: low key. Unlike other deputy governors of the Reserve Bank of India he has…
CHAITANYA KALBAG, contributing writer NEW DELHI – Although his three-year term as governor of the Reserve Bank of India was one of the shortest in the last 25 years, Raghuram Rajan will leave a pair of very large shoes to fill after his departure on Sept. 4. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is taking…
CHAITANYA KALBAG, contributing writer “That is a hard standard for anybody’s commentary to meet, especially if you have a press which is continuously looking for what they think are slights to the government. It is easy to build on that,” he noted as he sought to correct claims that his governorship was one “which has…
As he leaves India’s central bank, Rajan takes aim at his critics and points out the challenges awaiting his successor NEW DELHI Although his three-year term as governor of the Reserve Bank of India was one of the shortest in the last 25 years, Raghuram Rajan will leave a pair of very large shoes to…
Modi has one job: Get India’s lazy tiger of an economy to roar Indian finance minister Arun Jaitley will have two tough acts to follow when he stands in a few hours to present India’s budget for 2015-16. The first: On Feb. 26, railway minister Suresh Prabhu did a rousing, clackety-clack rendition of the railway…
Indians have been hiding money from their rulers for centuries. The best way to secrete your wealth away was to turn it into gold, and either wear it or bury it. Little wonder that India was the world’s biggest gold buyer last year. It consumed 842.7 tonnes. Despite the Indian economy not doing too well…
By Wednesday elections had been held for 438 seats, or four-fifths of the 16th Lok Sabha, and it seemed like a good point to draw breath and take stock of the men and women who will wield power over us for the next five years. Many of us believe that these elections will be decided…
If you believe in signs and omens, all the days and dates this year coincide with 1947, our year of independence (I have Amitabh Bachchan to thank for this nugget). The movie “Great Expectations” was also launched in 1947. That fits in with the sentiment nationwide. The expectations are scary because we have dug ourselves…
Three weeks and counting, and besides a bit of soft power-mongering there is no flurry of executive actions to take away one’s breath. Our impatience is understandable, but then the new dispensation is taking its lumps. Prime Minister Narendra Modi warned party workers in Goa that we will have to swallow bitter medicine if we…
One of my prized possessions is a fossilised limpet, a kind of sea snail that attaches itself very, very tightly to rocks. The fossil must be hundreds of thousands of years old. It must have been prised off a rock with some force, the kind that is trying to get many of our privileged leaders…
To begin with, Modi is under microscopic watch and Deng never was. Modi has a good majority in the lower house of Parliament, but that does not mean lawmakers will blindly rubber-stamp his legislative efforts. If you do the arithmetic the National Democratic Alliance stands little chance of a majority in the Rajya Sabha, even…
When a little girl named Topsy is asked in Uncle Tom’s Cabin if she knew who made her, she says “I expect I grow’d.” This Thursday, July 10, Arun Jaitley will declare financial independence when he unveils the Union Budget for 2014/15 without the Planning Commission breathing down his neck. True, the budget drafters in…
We are hopefully in the last of this summer’s dog days, and Sirius (or Svana as it is known in Hindu astrology) will glow a little less brilliantly in the hot night sky. Dog days are said to induce all sorts of mental upheaval, agitation, and unpleasantness. Perhaps that is why much of Europe wisely…
New Delhi, Dec 8 (Reuters) – India’s Gujarat state aims to be a primary focus for foreign investors, particularly in infrastructure like ports, power and roads, the leader of the west coast province said on Monday. “The word industrialization is humming in Gujarat’s air. Above all the government is investor-friendly,” Chief Minister Dilip Parikh told…
MANILA, March 15, Reuters – A 288 million dollar syndicated loan for the Philippines Long Distance Telephone Co marks a major initiative by Manila’s commercial bank creditors to recycle existing debt, bankers said. BOT International (HK) Ltd, Citicorp International Ltd and the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corp are lead managing the loan. Syndication started…
‘One has to learn new competencies’ Few of us know that KUMAR MANGALAM BIRLA, Chairman of the Aditya Birla Group, produced the critically acclaimed Hindi movie Black. Or that he has taken up pistol shooting as a hobby. Or that his teenage son is a keen photographer, but he knows a thing or two about…
Is Drinking A Ritual? Then I Think It Is Better to Close Our Diplomatic Missions! The appointment is at 1 pm at the Prime Minister’s Office in South Block. These imposing stone buildings, a few hundred yards away from Rashtrapati Bhavan, contain the offices of most of India’s government leaders. A surprisingly courteous Reception Officer enters…
The Government Is Helping Create A Privileged Class!’ Professor C.N. Vakil, eminent economist, formerly Director, School of Economics and Sociology, University of Bombay, and Director, Central Board, Reserve Bank of India: “The Janata government was suddenly thrust into power, and there was hardly any coherence between the various constituents of the Party. So decisions were…
‘My view has always been I don’t care about the topline’ Infosys co-founder N.R. Narayana Murthy has seen it all: bootstrapping an enterprise with what is loose change today, going on sales calls riding pillion on a Vespa scooter, walking away from a GE deal because it was leaving little profit on the table, setting…