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…
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…
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 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,…
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s dramatic announcement on January 18 that the Emergency in India is being relaxed and that elections to the Lok Sabha will be held in March, has created ripples of amazement the world over. All detained Opposition leaders have been released, and press censorship has been lifted. What do these developments portend?…
Speaking about the 1971 elections to a Newsweek correspondent, Mrs Indira Gandhi had said: “I am the real issue in this election.” In 1977, too, it is she who is the real issue. Her challengers’ election manifestos say hardly anything new, except that they vow to ‘wipe out’ the ‘scourges’ of the Emergency. 320 million…
From the Editor When I find myself in times of trouble Mother Mary comes to me speaking words of wisdom, let it be …
From the Editor Seven and a half minutes into the movie Paan Singh Tomar a journalist asks the eponymous hero, played by Irrfan Khan, why he became a dacoit. “In the ravines (of Chambal) you will find rebels. The dacoits are in Parliament,” the actor growls. It is probably coincidental that the movie was made…
From the Editor “I am a tiny speck in a sea of brands, buffeted by colour, geometry and neon, a homo brandus furiously rowing his flimsy coracle as it is carried inexorably towards the lethal rapids of consumerism. “Brand” has interesting etymology. We say something “brands itself on our consciousness” or that our latest purchase…
There had been many signs of the anti-Congress wind in the final days of the 1977 election campaign, but its magnitude amazed the canniest political forecaster. In a hurricane sweep, it snuffed out thirty years of uninterrupted Congress rule in independent India, and sent Premier Indira Gandhi, and her feared lieutenants, into sudden oblivion. The…
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…
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…
Atal Bihari Vajpayee on the struggle within “We are all like a family and there is bound to be dissent in a democratic party.” The trouble with Atal Bihari Vajpayee, 55, is he is too transparent. A rotund, dhoti-cad orator given to over- heated rhetoric, his misfortune is that he heads a party consisting in…
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 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 “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 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…
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…
Senior Editor of this newspaper were about to sit down for their evening news-planning meeting when the smoke alarms started jangling. Within moments the first floor newsrooms filled with thick billowing smoke. Journalist for both the Hindustan Times and its sister Hindi newspaper, Hindustan, began to file out and down the stairs There was no…
Hindustan Times on Saturday was launched on June 3 last year. It was a unique product and an unqualified success. Unique, because no other newspaper published a bespoke Saturday edition. Unqualified, because readers have been lured to it in huge numbers, and have stayed for the weekend. HT on Saturday acknowledges the 21st-century urban Indian…
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…
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told a group of senior Indian and South African businessmen on Monday that he was confident India can accelerate economic growth to the eight-to-ten per cent range. “We have been able to register an economic growth rate of eight per cent for four years in a row. Most analysts now believe…
Pretoria gets New Delhi’s support for Security Council seat The Leader of India and South Africa made a strategic trade off on Monday India decisively said it would support South Africa’s bid to occupy a permanent African seat in a reformed United Nations Security Council, and Pretoria in turn said it would support New Delhi’s…
The guns are yet to fall silent in the North-east but in places where development has made an inroad, peace has prevailed. Only by bringing all stakeholders on board can the government hope to end the region’s alienation. “… we have no social affinities with the Hindus or Mussalmans. We are looked down upon by…
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…
It began as a small tiff, as all battles do. The two antagonists identities lent it a delicious irony: Vijaya Raje Scindia, the ex-Rajmata of Gwalior, and her only son, ex-Maharaja Madhavrao. Over the years, this essentially political fight spilt out of the Gwalior palace into national attention. Today, it includes all the ingredients of…
Visually, the scene was vintage Bergman. A low canopy of sullen clouds scudded over a landscape whipped by icy winds. Despair seemed to be wrung out of every muscle of the ragged bunch of men stumbling down the village’s main dirt street. There were 15 of them, all walking with the collapsing gait of acute…
Of all the functions of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), there is one routine task crucial to the health of the economy: incinerating the mounds of soiled currency notes well past their prime and providing the commercial banks with mint-fresh replacements. Last month, in an effort to clear the backlog of ‘non-issuable notes’-inevitable when…
Delhi University is one of the few in the country to possess a full-fledged faculty of music. But for years now, the Music Department has been rocked by a clash between the shastrakars (grammarians) and the kalavidhs (performers). At the root of the controversy lies the dilemma of whether university teachers of music ought to…
Whatever else the government is butter-fingered at doing, it is adept at keeping the results of its impetuosity in a state of continuing suspense’. The campaign against the Bihar Press Bill is almost four months old now, but the Government has only indulged in a lot of double-talk—swearing by press freedom in one breath, and…
Two experts on Soviet studies, both lecturers in major universities, were informed late last month by the University Grants Commission (UGC) that their applications for short-term post-doctoral research trips to the USSR had been rejected. No reasons were given, but both lecturers believe it was because they were not considered politically acceptable. Another lecturer in…
Tyres are one essential commodity over which the Government seems to exert no control whatsoever. In the last six months prices have risen twice. And this is despite the fact that the last decade has seen a sudden burgeoning in the number of tyre-manufacturing units, which caused worries last year that there would be a…
While it lasted, last fortnight’s nine-hour hostage hold-up in Congress(l) Member of Parliament Dalbir Singh’s.Delhi apartment generated wild images of urban terrorism on the loose. lt was the first time ever that the problems of distant, rural India had been so dramatised and Ram Narayan Kumar, the improbable attacker, appeared to signal a new and…
Hiteswar Saikia was last Fortnight trying to settle into the hottest seat in India-the chief ministers hip of Assam. The diminutive, balding ‘politician had been selected to lead a ministry that had obtained one of india’s largest-ever majorities-91 seats out of 109. But the mandate had come drenched in blood, and ridden on an abysmally…
All private secretaries to Union ministers are equal, but S.R. Bhatia is more equal. Bhatia is the private secretary to Prakash Chand Sethi, the Union home minister, and currently he is at the centre of a storm that is battering at the doors of the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) and the Central Secretariat Service…
There was the baby-faced ex-pilot, all thumbs as he handled the controls in his political flight simulator; the rough-spun son of the, soil, a man of diamond-hard loyalty to the ruling family. catapulted into a devalued presidency; the freckle faced widow in rebellious flow, queen of the mimics and endowed with a hard nose; the…
For all those journalists who think they belong to a thankless and poorly-paid profession, there is hope on the horizon. It comes from the latest impresario to champion the “welfare and relief” of India’s toiling journalists: Jinendra Kumar Jain, 42. From obscure beginnings as a small-time publisher, Jain has used every ‘journalistic’ rung to hop…
Lush vegetation in the Thar? Groves of jamun trees? Mighty rivers the size of the Ganga and Indus? Seasons of monsoon-like rainfall? None of this is the fantasy it might appear at first sight. It was true in the distant past of the vast, inhospitable expanse of the Thar desert known to be one of…
The fuse has been burning for almost four years and the mood in the state has passed through all the faces of anger, despair and belligerence to arrive, on election eve, at the explosive. Gauhati has become unrecognisable. Once the citadel of lahe lahe, the Assamese philosophy of languor and peaceability, the capital now rumbles…
There is an old Indian parable that says it all: six blind men feel various parts of an elephant’s anatomy, and each one extrapolates, from his experience, a vision of a funny world. The difference, of course, is that everybody is talking about three old men-charan Singh, 79, Morarji Desai, 86, and Jagjivan Ram, 74,…
Events In Mizoram seems to be moving inexorably towards a resumption of insurgency. The cease-fire agreement, which came into effect at midnight on July 31 last year, has never seemed more fragile than it is now. As the indecisive talks with Mizo National Front (MNF) President Laldenga near the end of their sixth year, the…
Pranab Mukherjee’s first budget, at first glance so redolent of status quo, is peppered with little booby traps. Two paragraphs in his speech have caused heartburn amidst tyre manufacturers—who are dismayed about a stiff excise hike—and soft drink bottlers, who are cut up because Mukherjee has cracked down on soft drink franchises’ excise exemptions. The…
It was a browser’s dream come true – kilometres of books that took hold of the bibliophile’s heart-strings and did not stop tugging for hours. For eleven days last fortnight, Delhi’s Pragati Maidan became a meeting-place of minds. From a distance. as the Fifth World Book Fair moved to its finish in a welter of…
It was a visitation of grief and destruction, a cruel twist to the suffering Gujarat was already shrouded in. Meteorologists first noticed the brewing cyclone over the Arabian Sea on November 5, 1,200 km to the south-west of Goa. Forty-eight hours later it was just 600 km to the south-west of Bombay, and heading rapidly…
It was beyond the ken of a civilised society, a blood spattered vindication of a heartless government’s sudden constitutional piety. The carnage began with a few deaths on February 2; during the next three weeks, it rose every day with dreadful ferocity: a dozen at Cha maria on the 12th, a hundred at Gohpur on…
The Rashtriya Swyamsewak Sangh (RSS) is everybody’s favourite bugbear. So perhaps it was inevitable that it would be accused of having a hand in the feud between Mrs Gandhi and her rebellious daughter-in law Maneka. But though the charges can never really be substantiated, there is a connection which leads credence to the charge-the friendship…
Titled Judiciary: Attacks and Survival, the speech had been long in coming, the speaker delayed, first by an attack of diabetes in March and then by the postponement of the Dussehra break. On October 29, as Justice Vidyaranya Dattatreya Tulzapurkar of the Supreme Court finally faced an invited audience at the Symbiosis Law College in…
When Frenchman Bernard Bel and American Jim Arnold met by chance in a Delhi hotel in September 1979, it turned out to be a momentous occasion for Indian music. In the two years since, Bel and Arnold have together embarked on an ambitious research of Hindustani classical music’s vast oral tradition along mathematical lines. Never…
Not for nothing has Mizo National Front (MNF) President Laldenga acquired a reputation for being a cool and calculating man. Towards the end of 1981, however, his smooth phrases took on a jagged edge, as his talks with the prime minister’s special envoy G. Parthasarathi entered the final lap. Mizoram-watchers were not surprised, therefore, when…
Rarely had an event invited such determined and concerted action by Union Government: When the 24-hour national strike called by the National Campaign Committee (NCC) ended at 6 a.m. on January 20. two things stood out clearly: the effects of the strike were either negligible or tremendous, depending on which side of the fence the…
Although it is a blasphemous thought, it has cropped up in many a legal mind during the last few weeks: if bets were placed on the Supreme Court’s decisions, only a very shrewd bookie would emerge victorious. So unpredictable have the thought-processes of the nation’s highest court become. A three-judge bench consisting of Chief Justice…
Two experts on Soviet studies, both lecturers in major universities, were informed late last month by the University Grants Commission (UGC) that their applications for short-term post-doctoral research trips to the USSR had been rejected. No reasons were given, but both lecturers believe it was because they were not considered politically acceptable. Another lecturer in…
The salaried middle classes have time and again fallen prey to the Government’s more capricious economic decisions. But, one group that has suffered the most from constantly rising costs of living is the large, amorphous mass of the nation’s pensioners. Bereft of a common voice, nearly three million retired government employees and defence personnel have…
The India-Rubber man, Jagannath Mishra, had done it again. For months, the Bihar chief minister’s political fate had hung in the balance while the Supreme Court heard the Patna Urban Cooperative Bank case. Then, last fortnight, Mishra’s fortunes took a sudden upward swing. On December 16, the Supreme Court held, by a two-one majority, that…
Convicted killers Billa and Ranga were expected to make headlines last fortnight. Make news, they certainly did, but not the way everybody anticipated. Instead of being walked to the gallows on the morning of Sunday. November 8. 1981, in retribution for the brutal murder of Gita and Sanjay Chopra on August 26, 1978, the two…
Political cinema, like the new wave of the mid-’70s, has long acquired a pejorative meaning in India. At most, a political film that catches the public eye is built around a social theme that fits in with the Government’s meandering philosophy. A ‘successful’ political film also usually turns out to be feature-length, in colour, and…
Qutab Minar, the 72.5-metre-high monolithic tower that Iltutmish built 750 years ago, witnessed two shocks in its hoary life-span. In 1368, it was struck by lightning that ripped through its top; in 1803, an earthquake shook down a harp-shaped cupola that adorned its fifth storey. The latest shock, which came last fortnight, damaged none of…
I know no one can do me no harm because happiness is a warm gun. Yes it is. — John Lennon. 1968 Vishwanath Pratap Singh had cause to be happy on December 30 The prime minister herself had come down to Lucknow to pat him on his back and give his ministry a clean chit.…
“My resignation over the Dehuli issue is not important, law and order is,” was Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh’s answer when asked why, after owning moral responsibility for the massacre, he had not quit. “Either we protect the survivors, and liquidate the killers, or we might as well find somebody else to run…
On January 18 the strike by 2.5 lakh textile workers in Bombay’s 60 mills will complete a year; 25,000 of these workers in eight mills have been on strike since October 1981. In every way, the lengthening strike has become a grim milestone in India’s industrial history, with the opposing sides only gaining in belligerence…
So Ham-Handed and desperate for representatives of any stature in Assam has the Congress(I) become that it has jettisoned all concern for decorum and dignity in the loftiest institution of the land, the Supreme Court. Exactly four weeks after he delivered a judgment that granted Bihar Chief Minister Jagannath Mishra a reprieve from trial for…
Every dissenter is in a minority of one, and K. Ashok Rao, 36, deputy manager in Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL), is discovering what it is like to take on this public sector leviathan. Rao is, after all, only one of BHEL’S 70,000 employees. Yet, on February 23 this year, Rao filed a writ petition…
The Quality of justice seemed to be under tremendous strain last fortnight. At issue was the vexatious question of capital punishment. As usual, the shock waves emanated from an indecisive Supreme Court. In November 1981, the court had stayed executions all over the country after it was contended in the case of Kuljit Singh (alias…
That trite phrase ‘as old as the hills’ has suddenly taken on startling significance in relation to a thread that runs through Hindu beliefs: the cult of mother-worship. a veneration of the shakti form that harks back to primeval times. Recently, an lndo-US team of archaeologists working in the Son valley in Madhya Pradesh Sidhi…
I am your valuable,/The Pure gold baby,/That melts to a shriek,/I turn and burn,/Do not think I underestimate your/great concern./Ash, ash/You poke and stir,/Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—A cake of soap,/ A wedding ring,/A gold filling. …
The sprawling city that Charles-Edouard le Corbusier had designed for bureaucrats and retired people looked like an army encampment girding up for an enemy onslaught. As the expected moment of conflict neared, Chandigarh’s streets were gradually cordoned off with bamboo and steel barricades; a vast area taking in the Punjab, Haryana and Union territory secretariats,…
Iran’s much-vaunted Islamic revolution appears to have finally spilled over into India. Chanting Allah-o–Akbar and wielding primitive weapons like lathis bristling with nails, bicycle chains, knives and iron rods, a group of 100 pro-Khomeini Iranian students attacked 25 anti-Khomeini counterparts under cover of darkness in Aligarh on June 9. The bloody battle left 14 of…
Last week-end the seesaw battle being waged by Swraj Paul to take over Escorts and DCM slowed to a less suspenseful motion when the London-based industrialist suffered a series of setbacks. The first and predictable one came when Escorts’ Board of Directors refused on June 9 to register 4,62,377 shares lodged by Paul’s brokers Harish…
Rope-Making On Summer nights all over north India. people put out hundreds of thousands of cots in the open air to sleep on Most of the cots are made of rope strung on a wooden frame, and almost all of the rope comes from Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh. Rope-making in Saharanpur is a traditional skill…
There are times when India looks invincible, bursting with food stocks and blessed with a government that is gungho about its workability. But the rain gods do not work to a 20-point programme, and last fortnight weathermen the country over were developing cricks in their necks as they stared hopefully into the pale blue and…
Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s health more than anything else has been responsible for the sudden thaw in Delhi-Srinagar relations For a while last month Kashmir teetered on the brink of an insoluble crisis while the prickly Resettlement Bill hung fire, the Sheikh grew more belligerent and the Centre seemed trapped in a peculiar inertia. Then, on…
Within a few years from now, the westernmost and thirstiest fringe of Rajasthan, along the Indo-Pakistani border, is going to be brought to life by the digging of what will be the longest irrigation canal in the world up to date. Though the climate is torrid, the soil, here too, is good. When the water…
The story is as complicated as the whorls on a fingerprint, a ready-made screen-play bursting with grandeur, feudalism, pretension, and the tattered remnants of pomp and panoply. The theatre of this absurd epic, Raj Darbhanga in Bihar, has been reduced today to a threadbare relic of the fiefdom’s old glory. Darbhanga was once India’s largest…
Indian foreign policy has always suffered from contradictory tugs and pulls, and last month the Government exposed its tendency to over-react to global developments. Israeli Consul Yousuf Hasseen earned his expulsion with an outspoken interview with Bombay’s Sunday Observer (INDIA TODAY. July 31). But the subsequent announcement by Foreign Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao that…
No point of no return was so final as the one Charan Singh and Devi Lal reached on July 21. The crusty Jat leaders have clashed repeatedly over the last two years and a half-only to be dragged back into uneasy reconciliation every time by mediators. Incredibly, Charan Singh moved to hammer the last nail…
Anticlimax has become the boon companion of the Supreme Court. When the court reopened on July 18 after its summer vacation, it was shadowed by the cloud raised by stays granted on more than 20 executions of condemned murderers throughout the country. The flurry of stay orders stemmed from a May 6 ruling by a…
It was a grim warning for all users of intemperate language, and particularly for citizens of India who continue to believe that caste bestows special rights on an individual. Untouchability has long ago been ‘abolished’, but caste prejudice is one of the most insidious cankers eating into the country’s vitals. At 4 p.m. on August…
One of the misconceptions spawned by the Bihar Press Bill is that it will emasculate Bihar’s journalists. The truth is that Bihar’s journalists have already been emasculated by Chief Minister Jagannath Mishra. Using the twin methods of patronage and advertisement support, Mishra’s Government has directly subsidised an explosion of small papers across the state-the very…
Chaitanya Kalbag In the coolness of the early morning there is little traffic on National Highway 3. Outward bound from Nasik, the tar stretches infinitely in mottled grey, punctuated by the whoosh and blare of passing trucks. Through the sounds of the stirring countryside come the choral slaps of the marchers’ feet. It is a…
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…
‘This Year We Will Fall Short of the Target’ 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 Shamni Pande on the…
A disgraced Ranbaxy has a long and expensive journey ahead before it regains the trust of global and Indian customers. By E. Kumar Sharma and Chaitanya Kalbag Two inspectors working for the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), on a trip to a Ranbaxy Laboratories factory late in January 2008, were stunned by what they…
Two days after he and a brother judge handed down a blistering verdict in the Centre for Public Interest Litigation & Others vs Union of India & Others case, cancelling 122 telecom licences and severely indicting a former minister, now a jailbird, Justice ASOK KUMAR GANGULY was at peace in his study at home, behind…
In a candid conversation with Chaitanya Kalbag, Kishore Biyani reveals why he sold a controlling stake in his flagship Pantaloons stores to the Aditya Birla Group 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, says SEBI chief 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…
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…
Development is not a Linear Process, says World Bank’s Country Director 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…
Everybody is going to die, but I am going to die last, says Vedanta’s chairman 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…
The Method Man – Gujarat’s Chief Minister tells Chaitanya Kalbag in a wide-ranging interview that policy and process make a heady development cocktail Narendra Modi is not a tall man, but he exudes self-assurance and authority. There is something of the High Priest of Mohenjo-Daro about him, presiding at the altar of Capitalist Gujarat under…