BBC News is reporting the World Bank has approved a USD 600 million loan to India, aimed at “helping millions of poor farmers across India” (original report at Reuters). The money will go to supplement a government sponsored program, worth USD 3.32 billion, to refinance India’s cooperative banks, which would then offer cheaper loans to farmers. [...]
Res ipsa loquitur The official figure for the shortage of officers in the Indian army is 24.1%, a shortfall of 11238 officers against an authorization of 46615. Imagine the impact on the army budget, if all the deficiencies in the officer cadre were to be suddenly made up. The current revenue to capital expenditure ratio [...]
The share of the global economy belonging to emerging markets is increasing. According to Yahoo! Finance, Goldman Sachs has a new report indicating that the BRIC countries’ share of the global energy industry is now higher than that of the U.S.: At the end of the first Gulf War in 1991, 55 percent of the [...]
To many around the world, the Indian IT and BPO industry is the face of the current boom time, of India Rising or of whatever shorthand appeals to the reader or the writer. The industry is represented by NASSCOM, which has lost, through unfortunate coincidence, two of its leaders in their prime. First there was [...]
Following my previous post on climate change, Nitin pointed me to a paper in the EPW on mitigating climate change in India (also available at GDNet). The authors analyze the impact of economic instruments such as a carbon tax on carbon emissions to conclude that, “the amount of reduction of carbon emissions is not substantial enough [...]
Safety in numbers Indian Army’s record has many parallels with that of the Indian cricket team; one unmitigated disaster (1962), one unqualified success (1971), two stalemates (1948 and 1965), a cataclysmic foreign policy blunder (IPKF in Sri Lanka) and a pyrrhic PR victory in Kargil (1999). The pusillanimous display by the top brass and their [...]
Economist Luis Angeles suggests (in his paper Income inequality and Colonialism) that we can lay part of the blame for income inequality in the new world on colonialism: Our paper’s main point is that colonial history is a major explanatory factor behind today’s large differences in inequality among the world’s countries. We have reviewed the [...]
Budgeting- ‘Guns versus Butter’ The Indian budgeted defence expenditure (DE) for the current year (2007-08) is Rs. 96,000 crore and the Indian Army’s share of this pie is approximately 47%. The DE is 2.07% of the GDP; the corresponding figures for Pakistan and China are 3.4% and 2.8 % respectively. But there is a caveat [...]
Ravikiran Rao asks more questions than he answers in the June issue of Pragati – The Indian National Interest Review. Advocates for Indian family businesses claim that they can teach a thing or two to the rest of the world, both about family values and about running a business. But family values are not unique [...]
Acute shortage of parking space means I usually take an auto rickshaw whenever I have to go to the M G Road area. The usual fare is Rs. 35, so when the meter shows Rs. 45 (as it did last week), I demand an explanation from the driver. And the last time round, the driver’s [...]
The Fundamental Questions The Indian armed forces, in the broadest sense, comprise the three defence services – the army, navy and the air force; the federal or central police or paramilitary forces; and the state police forces. These categories are very broad and many defence organisations fall in either-or / both categories. The most glaring [...]
The recent G8 summit did not achieve what Angela Merkel may have hoped for – a new treaty with binding CO2 emissions cuts for the world’s major polluters – USA, China, and India. While both India and China were under considerable pressure to accept such targets, they resisted, promising only to “cooperate”. India’s position on [...]
Introduction Let me qualify the “Rupees One Lakh” phrase first. Essentially I refer to a level of affordability, based on the Tatas’ new low cost car which targeted that exact price point (since revised upwards). It is significant for two reasons: 1. It is a major achievement in manufacturing and marketing in the automobile world. [...]
But India needs to renew its love for rights and freedoms Jerry Rao’s op-ed in today’s Mint is a must read. That is why we are forced to ask ourselves: should we not have a political party that is a khullam-khulla defender of markets and an opponent of an intrusive state? S.V. Raju of the [...]
Rediff.com CEO Ajit Balakrishnan, in this edit page article in the Business Standard, talks about his interest in a certain paper by a Professor at IIT Bombay, and his attempts to commercialize it. Now, the interesting part is, though Professor Soumen Chakravarty gladly agreed to share his research, and be a consultant to Rediff, getting [...]
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