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, fertiliser […]
The economic benefits of a space program are a continuous source of debate. In India there is the constant suggestion that the thousands of crores spent on ISRO’s adventures should be utilized elsewhere. Here are some thoughts on why a space program makes economic sense.
Everyone knows that a space program offers great advantages from a […]
Before the issue of the historicity of the characters in the Ramayana came along to cloud the issue, much of the public debate hovered around political and environmental issues.
Neither the commercial viability, nor the putative military strategic benefits, were adequately scrutinised.
The commercial case for the project rests on the time and cost saved due […]
It always intrigued me that noone, especially in academia, had bothered to do robust research on the downstream multiplier effects of the IT-ITES industry. Anyone who has looked at the industry in any seriousness knows there have to be serious multipliers involved. All of those cab drivers, construction workers, caterers etc are the multiplier at […]
Wonk nirvana
The 2007 ICT Opportunity Index, the ITU explains, “has benefited from the expertise of several international and research organizations, (and) is based on a carefully selected list of indicators and methodology. It is an important tool to track the digital divide by measuring the relative difference in ICT Opportunity levels among economies and over […]
If you go to the NASA website, you can see beautiful satellite pictures of the earth at night. If you look carefully where the lights are, it says a lot about where the world economy is today. Europe is probably the most uniformly luminous; but not as bright as the eastern part of the US […]
How much of Dr Manmohan Singh’s talk on reforming agriculture will get translated into action?
Inaugurating the Second Agriculture Summit 2006 organised jointly by the Ministry of Agriculture and FICCI, the Prime Minister declared that the endeavour of his government would be to bridge each of the four deficit viz. the public investment and credit deficit, […]
In an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required), Richard Wilder & Pravin Anand claim that
India is rapidly evolving into Asia’s innovation center, leaving China in the dust. Its secret weapon? Intellectual property-rights protection. In recent years, New Delhi has taken big steps to protect these rights, and the results have been dramatic.
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Why doesn’t the government separate BSNL into two companies - Urban and Rural? If it is serious about rural connectivity, it should. What is happening right now is, the ADC goes into the pockets of the BSNL. And BSNL is seen offering great services in the urban areas, spurred by competition. But what is BSNL doing in the villages? Precious little. The rural telecom sector has hardly been touched by this revolution that our cities have witnessed.
Over the last few years, there’ve been an increasing slew of proclamations about America’s “decline” as an economic power — for instance, check this Fortune cover story by Geoff Colvin.
A key figure cited by the “declinistas” as evidence of America’s decline is the huge imbalance of engineering graduates between the US and those two […]
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 […]
Richard Celeste and Geoffrey Garrett write:
Skeptics are wont to claim that India’s successes in software are not “scalable,” and cannot be the basis for countrywide development.
But software is not a mere “industry” in the traditional sense of steel or textiles, to focus on two of China’s strong suits. An uber-industry, software is increasingly in everything.
Consider […]
Following in the wake of the Businessweek cover story, Knowledge @ Wharton has a special issue out on the rise of India as an R&D hub.
India has long enjoyed a reputation as a destination for IT and business process outsourcing. Now, the country is fast emerging as a major center for cutting-edge research and development […]