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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Think Big There is something in the nature of the world that it is sometimes paradoxically more difficult to make small changes than to make big ones. Logically consistent big changes are more likely to succeed because of the interconnectedness of the world. At times, big changes are forced on the system from external shocks [...]
Flashback The year is 2020. For nearly 12 years, India has seen an average annual GDP growth rate of over 12 percent more than quadrupling the per capita GDP from US$500 in 2008 to $2000, placing India in the league of middle-income economies. Stark poverty is a thing of the past. In much less than [...]
When I first moved to the US, I was struck by the phenomenon of shopping malls located far away from the city, about an hour along some highway. Land, it occurred to me, was cheap outside the city and what they did was to build these huge malls that were in some sense islands of [...]
Cities are engines of growth because they “manufacture” wealth. That is why rich economies are predominantly urban, and those economies that are largely rural are poor. Therefore the transition from a poor economy to a rich one depends on the transition of the majority of the population from being rural to urban. The scale and [...]
“If you believe that the money exists for building amazing futuristic cities in India, you must be certifiably insane.” That is the standard reaction to my scheme for building 600 cities for the 700 million Indians currently trapped in 600,000 villages. Where will the money come from? My answer is simple: out of thin air. [...]
Planning is uniquely human. Planning shapes not just human institutions and artifacts but indeed creates the future that is unknown and unknowable. Granted, the best laid schemes of mice and men, often go awry, as the poet lamented. When it comes to central planning, or planning by an all-powerful government bureaucracy, you can say that [...]
Creating a compelling vision which has the power to inspire is the first step to economic growth and therefore towards development. We have to imagine the future state first before we can make it a reality. Imagine that instead of 600,000 tiny villages, the same 700 million people were living and working in cities. Imagine [...]
Isn’t it astonishing that 2,600 years ago, when most of the world was living in tiny little human settlements, the Indus Valley civilization had well-planned cities of Harappa and Mohenjodaro? “Some of these cities appear to have been built based on a well-developed plan. The streets of major cities such as Mohenjo-daro and Harappa were [...]
Televisions don’t need sewers Preeti Aroon, over at FP Passport, asks why the slum-dwellers of Dharavi prefer TVs to toilets. I’ve visited Mumbai many times myself, and I’ve always wondered about the TV antennas poking through thatched-roofed shacks. How can “these people” buy TVs when their kids are malnourished and wading through sewage-infested water? I [...]
Anyone who writes about there being “two Indias” is necessarily wrong. Anyone who describes India’s jettisoning of the licence raj in 1991 using words like “neo-liberal” is necessarily confused. And anyone who writes about Indian agriculture quoting P Sainath and no one else is necessarily unbalanced. Rajinder Sahota, writing in the Financial Times (they actually [...]
Sramana Mitra, entrepreneur and consultant sent us this thoughtful piece Enterpreneurship is a critical element of a growth economy, and India is poised to unlock a Silicon Valley like entrepreneurial boom through the next 10 years. The beginnings are already in place, steps have been taken in the right direction. I have written extensively on [...]
This video of the Nandigram issue is distressing. I think one of the most cogent views on the SEZ issue are summed up by Nitin Desai in the article Are SEZs a good idea?
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