governance, political economy, institutional development and economic regulation
Covid-19 has made the Bharat-India divide even sharper. The obsessive, 4G connected, masked and gloved urban Indian checking for updates and worrying about a post-Covid-19 future on the one hand and rural India, carrying on stoically as always, too busy with the daily mechanics of agricultural production to care overly about the “outside” world, except […]
Read More Needed tough love not freebiesIn a quietly subversive “revolt” 47 officers of the Indian Revenue Service, which administers taxes on income, hit the headlines this week with a policy paper “Fiscal Options and Response to Covid-18 Epidemic” FORCE outlining the tax measures government could take to deal with the economic downside of Covid-19. Too young to be seen or […]
Read More May the FORCE be with young IRS officersWe have needed one since the 2008 global financial crisis when massive fiscal interventions provided the fizz to drag out a functioning economy for the next decade. The buzz fades This fizz has now run dry, sapped by – corporate freeloaders, who misused the cheap money at the expense of small investors, who naively assumed […]
Read More India needs a haircutGovernments reveal their true character under stress. China, by design or accident, showed the world how national interest comes first, by ruthlessly stamping out the disease within Wuhan itself – at a high and possibly underreported, cost to the folks who live there. Strong willed, independent minded United Kingdom, addicted to significant anal behavior, fiddled […]
Read More Unpacking India’s response to the COVID aftermathNo, the Prime Minister has not become a biological grandfather. But he has adopted all of India’s poor – all 400 million of them – around 80 million families- by the extant definition of those needing support in these times of stress. Vibing with the poor To be fair, this fascination with helping the poor […]
Read More Musing with Grandpa ModiAsking a politician to abjure politics is like telling a dancer not to tap his feet to the music – a physical impossibility. Expectedly PM Modi used the April 14 COVID update to pay his respects to Baba Saheb Ambedkar whose birthday it was – illustrating the proclivity of BJP managers to red flag branding […]
Read More A “Big State” post COVID19How well the government has done in managing the crisis will be known after the crisis is over. Sadly, too late to be of interest to the average reader. What can be assessed contemporaneously is whether government is headed in the right direction. Thanks to the great India genome, natural selection, geography or strong government […]
Read More Political & economic sense: Extending lock down = caving into the COVID 19 threatLinks are tenuous between India and Mexico. This marginally upper-middle-income economy (per capita income $10,500 about the same as China) with a population of 126 million (about the size of the state of Uttar Pradesh) doesn’t matter much geopolitically. It is tied at the hip to its powerful neighbour- the United States. No reason, therefore, […]
Read More Mexico can teach us COVID 19 management
Opinion India 