Coasting down the six-lane highway from Ahmedabad to Gandhinagar, wheels barely touching the asphalt, it is tempting to forget that you are in the India of traffic chaos, noise and tumult. Gujarat’s administrative capital reminded me more of Putrajaya, Malaysia’s high-tech capital complex outside Kuala Lumpur, than of the headquarters of Modi Unlimited. The Gujarat…
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 the gaze of an…
As we prepare to vote, lots of loose talk lies ahead If you believe in the theory of evolution, as I do, then you will agree that one of the very few things that separates us from our earliest ancestors is the faculty of speech. Scientists speculate that we were communicating through speech as far…
Will we get a Lokpal? Will we not? The answer is blowin’ in the wind It’s a nail-biter. I predicted in another column that the Lok pal Search Committee of eight eminent persons might cap a five-year slow waltz just before the general election. On January 17, the Supreme Court instructed the committee to come up…
It’s good we now have a GST, but its design is another matter Since you all love acronyms for the Good and Simple Tax and the Grand Stupid Thought, the headline is my humble contribution to your lexicon. I dare you to find me a single expert who can measure the financial cost of the…
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…
Team leader Modi is fishing in a shallow talent pool How much 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 Bhagwat,…
Strong, sustained growth is possible—if we don’t trip ourselves up We can hope that in the run-up to the next general election we will not suffer the type of jolts to our nervous systems that hit us in November 2016 and July 2017 with demonetisation and the introduction of the GST. “Those two shocks seem…
The only antidotes to fake news are truth and commonsense Start exercise your smartphone thumb, because the next big election will be fought on our mobiles. The latest Internet and Mobile Association of India survey says 86.5 per cent of users access the Internet via mobiles and smartphones. That works out to over 430 million…
Many anniversaries this year, but few happy ones This is a year of anniversaries , some unpleasant, some prescient, some momentous. CE 2019 is important not only because of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s crushing victory in the world’s biggest election – in many ways a more portentous event than Narendra Modi’s 2014 ascent to prime…
Merchandise, tourism, a board game, a biopic, a web series … If you want to decompress from the 2019 election campaign, and haven’t already donned the colours to be a cheering face in a shouting crowd at one of the prime minister’s rallies, then go to his website, which has a link to ‘NaMo Merchandise’.…
Get set: Campaign 2019 will rivet, horrify and confound you For the second time in five years, I was struck by how apposite Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If’ is in relation to Narendra Modi. At one place it says: If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common…