The Indian Economy Blog

Celebrity isn’t wisdom. And yet, newspapers run after celebs and get them to pontificate grandly on all kinds of subjects. Check out this piece in DNA in which Raveena Tandon expresses the view that Mumbai should have a cap to its population, and it should not “accept or absorb” any more people after that limit [...]

Consider this experiment: you are a punter, and you get a letter from me saying that I have the ability to forecast the result of all cricket matches, and if you pay me Rs. 10,000, I shall tell you what will happen in the next game so that you can make a killing — perhaps [...]

In an article in the Wall Street Journal on Asia’s graying populations, Nicholas Eberstadt writes on India:
The overall population profile [of India] will remain relatively youthful, with a median age projected at just over 30 in 2025. But this is an arithmetic expression averaging diverse components of a vast nation. Closer examination reveals two demographically [...]

DNA speaks to Prakash Karat and comes away with the conclusion that the left is going to continue pushing the policies that have failed India for the last 58 years: redistributing wealth instead of generating it.

The telecom sector in India continued to record rapid growth in the month of October, adding 3.24 million new subscribers. This takes the total subscriber base to 116 million and the tele-density to 10.66 (per 100 population). In the mobile phone sector alone, 2.9 million new subscribers were added, taking the GSM subscriber base to [...]

Some time back I had linked to an Economist special report, Democracy’s Drawbacks, which talked about how India’s democratic process held back reforms from time to time. A reader from Princeton, Bruce Gilley, responds in this week’s Economist.
SIR – You write that India’s people have chosen representatives who have questioned dramatic economic reforms. You write [...]

A version of this piece was first published today in the Wall Street Journal as “Self-Delusion.” (Free link this week, but subscription from the next.) It was written a couple of weeks back, and has its genesis in this post of mine.
Organized slavery ended decades ago, but to go by the criticism of some leftist [...]

A friend who just returned from a visit to China tells us
The Indian Economy Blog site wasn’t accessible in China.
Oddly enough the NYT and virtually every Indian paper was available. As was the WSJ and the FT. I tried the IEB site repeatedly along with BBC – which I knew was persona non grata [...]

More of the same where the same has failed
Here’s a conundrum: it is amply clear that given the abysmal state of India’s roads, railways, ports, irrigation and electricity grids, and given the rapid growth of the Indian economy over the past several years, good infrastructure is in great demand in India. Yet the central government’s [...]

With exceptions, of course.
Do read TN Ninan’s fine piece in Business Standard, “Our ‘new class’“