Earlier this year the Doha round of WTO trade negotiations collapsed (again) after the US, Europe, India, and Brazil were unable to reach a reciprocating agreement on cutting farm subsidies in the west, and lowering industrial goods and service barriers in the developing world. India and Brazil blamed the US and Europe for not lowering [...]
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 [...]
The DMK came to power in Tamil Nadu state promising a free colour television for every household, regardless of income or the number of television sets already owned. And now it is setting up a company to provide cable television. Bad? Not quite. As Badri Sheshadri writes, it is probably the only way to inject [...]
The FT has a very illuminating article on the politics of climate change. It is illuminating because it brings a perspective to the debate that has sadly been lacking so far – one of pragmatic international relations. Taking that perspective explains why the US, China and other major polluters have not signed on to any [...]
Pragati – The Indian National Interest Review is a monthly magazine on strategic affairs and public policy; and is devoted to promoting economic freedom, an open society and realism in international relations. It regularly features articles and essays from many IEB bloggers. You can download and subscribe to the free digital community edition of the [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Recently the West Bengal West Bengal State Marketing Board chairman Naren Chatterjee had to say this about Metro’s entry into the state, “have heard that they will sell directly to the trade then what will happen to the people in the chain, they will become jobless. We will not allow any one who disturbs the [...]
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 [...]
Yes, the IT industry has to do more for India. But not what Amartya Sen says it should Amartya Sen made a JFK-esque speech asking the IT industry what it had done for India. His point was not that the IT industry isn’t doing anything for the economy at large—he concedes that it is—but that [...]
Some interesting commentary in the papers this week: Anantha Nageswaran’s opening salvo, in the newly launched Mint: Central bankers in most of the developed world have taken that to heart in dealing with financial markets. Financial markets, in theory, have more participants than those engaged in the economic marketplace. Hence, the outcomes of their buying [...]
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