India’s Underground & Hinterland seem to be the topics du jour :-) In the Wall Street Journal, Peter Wonacott says India Defies Slump, Powered by Growth in Poor Rural States. Rama Lakshmi of the Washington Post said as much last month: Vast Rural India Sparkles As an Expanding Market About 72 percent of India’s billion-plus [...]
Unorganised and organised retail must coexist and flourish in India… After almost scaring the Tata Motors away from West Bengal, Mamata Bannerjee has now trained her guns on Reliance Retail. Well, Reliance Retail should be used to being targeted by feisty women politicians. Immediately after coming to power in Lucknow, Ms. Mayawati had earlier undertaken a [...]
So the UPA government is set to improve credit availability (and write off loans) for farmers. Laveesh Bhandari tells you why, if improving the livelihood of farmers is a policy goal, the Manmohan Singh and P Chidambaram are barking up the wrong tree. Here lies the crux of the matter. If use of new seeds, [...]
How many jobs have the new retailers actually created? The Wall Street Journal, in an article last month, writes that jobs in India’s booming retail industry are a ticket out of the slums for many. The article, titled Humble Jobs at the Mall Are Lifting Legions of Indians Out of Poverty and told from the [...]
As another year draws to an end, extracts from two speeches delivered this year — one by an ex-finance minister (who happens to be the current Prime Minister) and another by the current Finance Minister. Both the speeches were delivered to a foreign audience and the extracts reproduced here cover only the hard facts, not [...]
While as an army Jawan fighting militants in Kashmir gets a monthly pay packet of Rs 14,000 and host of other benefits including allowances in the form of disturbed area allowance his counterpart in the CRPF draws a meager pay of Rs 7,500
…to counter the rising rupee. Professor Kaushik Basu of the Cornell University believes that the rise of the rupee against the dollar is inevitable in the mid-term. He also believes that the sudden collapse of the dollar is unlikely but there is not much that India can do to alter the current dynamics of exchange [...]
One of the criticisms leveled against India’s SEZ policy is that the zones are too small to make a real difference. But there’s a very big zone that could be an SEZ, especially if the state’s politicians—who are all for ‘autonomy’—decided economic freedom is something that is well in their capacity to achieve. And set [...]
In a series of seven short posts over at The Acorn I show how Tehelka juggled facts and figures in order to poke holes into the “Vibrant Gujarat” story. I’m posting the concluding piece of the series here, to summarise where we are at the end of our examination of Shivam Vij’s article. There is [...]
Let’s have unilateral trade liberalisation Abi is right. Dweep didn’t go far enough. What India needs to do is to say “to hell with the WTO” and unilaterally, completely, dismantle trade barriers. For that matter, so does everyone else. Here’s Sauvik Chakraverti on the topic on TCS Daily: Unilateral free trade is a very good [...]
In today’s DNA Mukul Asher & Amarendu Nandy argue that the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) is ill-equipped to fulfil its mandate of providing retirement income security. The EPFO is an unusual national provident fund in combining the features of a defined benefit scheme (Employees Pension Scheme or EPS, introduced in 1995) with those of [...]
Why strive for excellence when mediocrity will suffice? You can’t blame Dr Manmohan Singh for telling us what the problem is. Soon after he took office, he told us that fixing the bureaucracy was crucial for India’s development. Last year, he said that the Naxalite insurgency is the biggest threat to internal security. And, now, [...]
Bongop’o’ndit rips apart another Pankaj Mishra article: Pankaj Mishra writes an opinion piece for Outlook’s India at 60 issue , seemingly cautioning on excessive championing of and reveling in India’s current resurgence at the cost of insensitivity to myriad problem that still plague the country. I say seemingly because that’s how he starts, and then [...]
I have worked in India and in Indian organisations abroad for a large part of my professional career. However when I think back I cannot recall more than 2 physically disabled colleagues during that entire time. Mind you, I am a sociable kind of person so my visual – and conversational – range extended beyond [...]
This week’s issue of The Economist has a report on how (and why) Japanese investment into China is declining. But the appeal of China as a manufacturing hub and a huge new market is not universally shared among Japanese businesses. Some companies are moving operations to other countries instead, and others are keeping business back [...]
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