From the Editor Once every year, we pay obeisance to the best and strongest companies in India. It is not grudging admiration. Our corporate icons deserve every bit of their applause. No management school, or case study, or how-to hardback that you pick up at an airport bookstore can teach you how to plot a…
At Business Today we write about companies all the time. Often, it is a top-down view. We meet the Chief Executive Officer, the senior members of the management team, the stock-market analysts whose job it is to keep a gimlet eye on their wards, the suppliers, the competitors, the regulators. But it is very important,…
In 1908, when Henry Ford began making his revolutionary Model Ts on an assembly line in Detroit, there were 241 carmakers in the United States. (In comparison, India has 20 carmakers in 2013). “I will build a car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the…
Sometimes India’s economy resembles a rambunctious teenager brought up short by a finger-wagging headmaster. Our finance minister can now recite with his eyes closed a string of figures that seek to prove that India has not done badly at all in comparison with the rest of the developing- and indeed the developed- world. P. Chidambaram…
From the Editor Business Today’s team of reporters was putting finishing touches to the BT-YES Bank Best CFO Survey starting on page 57. The 14 men and one woman who have won this year’s awards, chosen by a stellar jury after a rigorous nationwide search, bring to life the satisfaction of making those numbers on…
From the Editor I remember sticking an aluminium one-yen coin and a copper one-US-cent coin to my computer screen in Tokyo around the mid-1990s and watching in fascination Las they became equal in value, with the yen appreciating to 100 to the dollar. It was nice for frequent travellers like me- when I paid my…
14 October 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Oct 14 – The Manila International Futures Exchange Inc (MIFE) hopes to start trading coconut oil, copra and coffee contracts later this month to enhance its sugar and soybean trading base, the president of the company which manages the exchange, Uisdein McInnes, said in an…
From the Editor Looking down at my bowl of gazpacho at dinner one recent night. I realised that I do not own a single moustache spoon, with guards, so that guests with resplendent whiskers could eat soup and not leave any trace behind- the kind made for Maharaja Ganga Singh of Bikaner around 1900. Nor…
19 October 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Oct 19, Reuter – Philippine President Corazon Aquino can expect a volley of anxious questions about her government’s economic direction when she faces members of 13 major business groups on Tuesday, analysts said. It will be her first economic speech since she came close…
From the Editor We need to place the AgustaWestland helicopter “kerfuffle”- as a former defence minister put it- in context. The 12 AW101s were headed for the Indian Air Force’s Communication Squadron, which flies VVIPs around. to replace its ageing Mi-8 fleet. The new helicopters are strictly not combat craft-they are personnel carriers and can…
22 October 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Oct 22 – The Philippine government has made major changes in its debt-to-equity conversion program to take into account a sharp drop in value in the country’s debt paper, Central Bank Senior Deputy Governor Gabriel Singson said. He told reporters at a news conference…
From the Editor Within the space of a week, I met N.R. Narayana Murthy for a long and friendly conversation at his airy venture-capital office in Bangalore’s Jayanagar suburb and then conducted telephone interviews with the company’s Chairman, K.V. Kamath, who was in Mumbai and its CEO, S.D. Shibulal, who was attending the World Economic…
From the Editor Most of us are lucky if we get fifteen minutes of fame. You can be famous, but not rich. Fame is fleeting, and unless you are V.S. Naipaul, your best shot at fame is when you are young or Amitabh Bachchan, in good health, good to look at, and very good at…
28 October 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Oct 28, Reuter – The United States said on Wednesday it was withdrawing a military attache from the Philippines following accusations that he interfered in a failed coup attempt in August. A U.S. embassy statement said assistant army attache Lieutenant-Colonel Victor Raphael would depart…
30 October 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Oct 30 – The Philippine government and creditors of a private fertiliser firm have reached agreement on a 56.5 million dollar debt that has held up the country’s recent debt rescheduling agreement, bankers and officials said. A senior foreign banker told Reuters that lawyers…
4 November 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Nov 4, Reuter – The new customs chief of the Philippines says he frowns on blatant graft but has told his poorly-paid officers they can accept “tokens of appreciation” because they are a part of Filipino culture. “I am looking at this in a…
5 November 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Nov 5 – The heads of national oil companies of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) said firm world crude prices make the oil outlook for the near future optimistic, but they warned that regional cooperation must improve in order to meet a…
From the Editor The US Congress stepped back just in time from the fiscal cliff, but Indian sensibilities about the Delhi gang rape and killing fell off another cliff days before we went to press. P.N. Vasanti of the CMS Media Lab told me that coverage of the rape aftermath (and by that I mean mostly…
9 November 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Nov 9 – Any fall in commodity prices resulting from the crash in world stock markets could badly affect the Philippines, Central Bank governor Jose Fernandez said. “Probably far more important than exchange rates and interest rates are commodity prices,” he told reporters. ‘Because then…
From the Editor We are waiting to exhale. Food prices fell in the last fortnight of December, for the first time in six years, and headline inflation is expected to drop sharply to about 7.5 per cent in December. The rupee has risen two weeks in a row. Industrial production rose 5.9 per cent in…
From the Editor Three economists are gazing at a glass half full of water. The optimist sees a glass half full. The pessimist sees a glass half empty. The realist picks up the glass and drinks the water. I’m sure you’ve heard that joke, but we are hard put to find some levity as we…
24 November 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Nov 24 – The Philippines has moved to defend its foreign exchange reserves by curbing U.S. dollar trading between banks, easing bank deposit rules for overseas workers and cutting purchases of debt paper with foreign exchange. The new rules were announced as the peso…
From the Editor Companies and human beings are surprisingly similar. Over a long period of time we build an intricate geodesic dome of habits, rules. principles, emotions, likes and dislikes. Changing ourselves is very. very difficult, even when we know that our future well-being, prosperity and happiness depend on how we change and adapt. Similarly,…
From the Editor It was a bracing week: I started and ended it with conversations with honest men whose cleanliness shone through. Both had had something to do with ‘national resources’ up in the stratosphere or deep down beneath the seabed. There is much financial skullduggery afoot, but we have not run out of sentinels,…
1 December 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Dec 1 – Short-term interest rates have shot up in the Philippines as the peso has come under increasing pressure and the central bank has been forced to intervene heavily to defend the local currency, bankers said. Bankers’ Association of the Philippines (BAP) figures show…
7 December 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Dec 7, Reuter – Former Philippine finance minister Jaime Ongpin was found with a bullet wound in the head in his Manila office on Monday in what his son and police said looked like suicide. Police investigator Romeo Urbana said a guard at the…
11 December 1987 Reuters News English (c) 1987 Reuters Limited MANILA, Dec 11 – The Philippine government intends to boost tax collection, reorder its expenditures, and rationalise state-owned corporations to remedy Its dismal fiscal situation, Finance Secretary Vicente Jayme said He told a meeting of the Philippine Economic Society that the country’s tax revenues as…
From the Editor One speaks the glory of the British queen, And one describes a charming Indian screen; A third interprets motions, looks, and eyes; At ev’ry word a reputation dies. Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock: Canto 3 At every word of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, Manmohan Singh’s reputation has…
The day before this issue of Business Today hits news stands, America will vote for a new president. The day after you invest less than 80 US cents in our quality journalism (in the event that you paid its full cover price), the Chinese Communist Party will meet to anoint a new leadership. Both transitions…
From the Editor Turkmenistan’s “President for Life” Saparmurat Niyazov erected a 50-ft gold-plated statue of himself in the centre of the capital Ashgabat, eight years before he gave immortality the slip in 2006. The statue rotated through the day, always pointing to the sun. We have not got to the gold-plating stage yet, but we…
A laughter club in Mumbai is forced to “zip it” because a humourless neighbour is disturbed, not long after a 63-year-old cartoon unleashes a cleansing of school textbooks that would warm a tin-pot dictator’s heart. In the same “cosmopolitan” city, a woman is arrested for possessing liquor that she was using to make chocolates, and…
From the Editor The deeper we sail into the economic doldrums, the greater is the wonderment that there is so much locked-up promise in India that we cussedly ignore. Politics oozes from every pore of ours; we expect the economy to take care of itself. Over the past few months I have talked in great…
From the Editor There are times when we at Business Today chafe at being a fortnightly. There is so much happening in business and the economy that we story tellers are fit to burst. It is not just what you see in the printed magazine our website www.businesstoday.in is up to nearly a million page-views.…
From the Editor Our Prime Minister can seem like an accidental politician. Speaking publicly, he comes across as earnestly wooden, and when he addressed the nation on September 21, the eve of the autumnal equinox, you often felt the tele-prompter was scrolling up faster than Manmohan Singh could enunciate, But speak he did, and many…
From the Editor Why did god create stock-market analysts? To make weather forecasters look good, runs the rather puerile joke. But seriously, company analysis is an earnest business-in much of the world, that is, except India. I remember in my wire-service days we used to have lively debates on how to report stock price movements…
From the Editor Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5 If you have ever had the misfortune of falling…
The economy is whirling around in a populist spiral Pranab Mukherjee is starting to look worryingly like a feckless heir squandering his generous inheritance while his fretful guardian in the person of Duvvuri Subbarao tries to board up the door and keep the wolves at bay with a nail here and a nail there. The…
From the Editor “There is always time to add a word, never to withdraw one,” said Baltasar Gracian, a 17th Century Spanish Jesuit monk. More of us could benefit by learning to speak little and be heard when we do speak characteristics of Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi and Kumar Mangalam Birla. Both were born with…
From the Editor Pity the modern banker, who is described in one of the stories in this issue as “pin-striped”. In India, of course, some of the most powerful bankers sport bandhinis, ikats and kanthas. But you have to feel sorry for our bankers. We don’t have anarchists waving their fists at bank CEOS’ pay…
If you look down from a helicopter at any of India’s teeming cities you will see millions of people scurrying around using every known form of locomotion as they move between structures, many of them once described as skyscrapers when we were more down to earth, all busily engaged in every imaginable type of commerce,…
From the Editor India’s Parliament House does not resemble a ziggurat, but it does remind me of the Tower of Babel and how God descended to earth to check things out. He was so alarmed by what seemed achievable by all humans speaking one language, we are told, that he decided to scatter them and…
From the Editor I had never handled a tool in my life; and yet, in time, by labour, application, and contrivance, I found at last that I wanted nothing but I could have made it, especially if I had had tools. However, I made abundance of things, even without tools; and some with no more…
From the Editor In Greek mythology, the Minotaur was a creature with a bull’s head and a man’s body who dwelt at the centre of the Cretan maze or labyrinth. Theseus killed the monster, but forgot to put up a white sail to signal his victory when he returned to Athens, and his distraught father…
From the Editor Some things were on a fast track as the heat dragged us into the dog days of June, and some were on a slow track. A hirsute man in ochre raiment was about to stop eating, and since we at BT chronicle business it is relevant to note that Ramdev’s Patanjali Yoga…
From The Editor It seems churlish to sound a pessimistic note about India’s economy when a large contingent of our business and political leaders is hard at work evangelizing “India Inclusive” at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Here in teeming India, though, we could not help gathering several worrying threads in a cautionary skein.…
From the Editor “If a thousand suns were to rise in the heavens at the same time, the blaze of their light would resemble a little the supreme splendour of the Lord…. I am time, the destroyer of all; I have come to consume the world.” The Bhagavad Gita, Ch. 11-12 & 32 Julius Robert…
From the Editor Do you know what a “dominant undertaking” is Suresh Krishna does. The Chairman and Managing Director of Sundram Fasteners lived every day with the provisions of the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices, or MRTP, Act. Every month in the ’70s and ’80s. Krishna would travel to Delhi to pace the corridors at…
From the Editor This has been a summer of discontent, and the portents are not auspicious. One day after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced his second underwhelming Cabinet reshuffle this year, Mumbai was hit by three terrorist bombs. The markets took in both the fizzle and the pop with equanimity: the Sensex fell only 1.5…
From the Editor Stock markets and their behaviour are an inexact science. Technical analysts will study head and shoulders patterns, Fibonacci retracements, stochastic oscillators and sundry chicken entrails to tell you why prices are headed up or down. It’s like baking a bad lasagna- layers of febrile data, volatile fund flows, political flux, a government…
From the Editor Know one’s onions” means to know one’s subject well. But do we really know why our economy fares as it does, how supply and demand and rain and drought affect commodity prices and push food inflation close to 18 per cent, or the price of onions up by 350 per cent? Why…
From The Editor “Then we had to find the rule and the string again, and a new hole was made; and, about midnight, the picture would be up— very crooked and insecure, the wall for yards round looking as if it had been smoothed down with a rake, and everybody dead beat and wretched—except Uncle…
From the Editor Most of us are cursed with poor memory. We need episodic markers to help us measure our lives from one significant remembrance to another. Our collective memory is etched with historic events. The day Neil Armstrong walked on the moon/Indira Gandhi was assassinated/the Berlin Wall fell have calibrated the second half of…
From the Editor I remember my first car with great fondness. It was a Fiat 1100D, and I crashed it barely a month after my wife and I bought it. There was another crash a little later; we were the third owners of the car, but it held up well. Three years later we sold…
Jeff Immelt stepped into Jack Welch’s shoes four days before 9/11. Even more than the legendary Welch, he has GE blood in his veins – his father worked for the company and he met his wife at the company. The 28-year-old GE veteran stands six feet four and has a firm grip, as befits an…
Early this month I travelled to Agra to walk barefoot around the Taj Mahal, the only wonder of the world that stands in honour of a woman. Make no mistake. That mausoleum was built three and a half centuries ago in memory of a very powerful woman. She was a confidante and counsellor to Shah…
And now at the end he found himself in his own house, on his own half-lot of land, his own portion of the earth. That he should have been responsible for this seemed to him…stupendous.” …
H for Hitler. A for arrogant, R for rascal, I for idiot …” I’m sure many of us remember the “Hari Sadu” commercial about the cheeky young man getting back at his nasty boss because he’s already heard from job site naukri.com. It was acid, funny, and emblematic of the “me do” generation that is…
Nothing matches the rush of blood to the brain when you read super-sized success stories. Nothing tells the story of the Milky Way of densely-packed stars across India’s business sky as vividly as our annual BT500 rankings. Year after year, from the first listing in Business Today’s March 7-22 1992 issue, the rankings have chronicled…
Remember when mall meant a tree-shaded promenade in Shimla or one of those picturesque cantonment towns, and plastic was when your grandmother graduated from tin buckets in the bath- room? Now the Oxford dictionary lists “malling: the action of passing time at a shopping mall”, and tykes, tots, teens and tweens wash through our malls…
I experienced my epiphany about consumer media a couple of years ago on a Tokyo subway. When I lived in Japan in the mid-1990s, commuters would be bent earnestly over their little pulp paper backs or Manga comics. Now, just over a decade later, everyone’s fingers are flying over buttons on little machines that are…
New Age Guru peps up India story believers “When you were five years old, you were happy nearly all the time. Somebody had to make you unhappy Now you are 30-plus and have achieved your dreams, and you are unhappy all the time. Somebody has to make you happy” Delegates at the India Economic Summit…
Inscrutable are the ways of public-sector trade unions. The Federation of the State Trading Corporation Employees’ Unions (FSTCEU) lived up to this image when it resorted to an eight-day strike last fortnight over a peculiarly non-economic issue: the shifting of the corporation’s Delhi branch office from its location on the arterial Janpath to Malcha Marg…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…