governance, political economy, institutional development and economic regulation
BOOK REVIEW Work 3.0 By Avik Chanda and Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay Penguin Business 2023 466 pages Rs 524 The central concern of the authors is how to retain human-centric workplaces in the face of the expected tech onslaught increasingly making machines central to the design, implementation and monitoring of most functional tasks catering to human needs. […]
Read More Cyborg WorkplacesBOOK REVIEW India’s Finance Ministers A K Bhattacharya Penguin (Business)2023 435 pages, Rs 999/- Finance Ministers (FMs), despite their dour calling, do not always follow the bland, understated credo expected of them. This is one message in this carefully packaged, extensively researched tome on eleven, post-Independence, Indian FMs, till the Emergency in 1977. Three themes […]
Read More Finance ministers who ruled early, Post Independence IndiaIt is incongruous for a country which is aiming for global digital primacy to also top a list of governments which shut down the Internet the most. According to the data from Access Now, a web-based entity dedicated to preserving access to the Internet, India has shut down the Internet 33 times so far this […]
Read More The Sounds of Internet Silence In ManipurThe good news that India’s GDP grew at 6.1 percent in Q4 (January to March 2023) and at 7.1 percent over the entire fiscal year (2022-23) received less than deserved attention. The previous fiscal year (2021-22) was the first post-covid normal year. To clock a growth rate of 7.1 percent over a normal base year […]
Read More Greenlighting GrowthIndia, like the rest of the world, is not yet visibly on the freeway to net zero. Greta Thunberg and others of her persuasion believe this is because young people—future victims of climate change—are not in charge. This could well be true. But consider the recklessly fast-forwarded track for Artificial Intelligence (AI), Fintech, or social […]
Read More On the Freeway to net zeroThere is a 93 percent probability that at least one year between 2022-2026 will dislodge 2016 as the warmest year. More worryingly, the probability of a temporary increase in temperature more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels (1850-1900) which was zero in 2015, has now increased to 48 percent. The warning bell is ringing, and it […]
Read More Energy Transition Under fiscal and Institutional stressThe late Atal Behari Vajpayee (Prime Minister of India in 1996 and 1998–2004) had a keen ear for technology. After listening patiently to complicated, technologically correct proposals, he could bring such high-level discussions down to earth by wondering how these “best in class” options could actually be implemented on the ground. Best in class options […]
Read More Decarbonization: Institutionally adriftAn India, more populous than China this year, and growing to 1660 billion people by 2050, is touted as good news by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) – an agency which monitors population trends and its implications for the economy. Most Indians though, have mixed feelings about adding 240 million odd people to what […]
Read More Think before you have a babyMonetary policy that hunts with the advanced economy “hounds”—via symmetric upward adjustments in policy interest rates over the last year—and simultaneously runs with developing country “hares”—by desperately trying to revive stalling growth—has contradictions just waiting to come home to roost. That growth in India is stalling is clear from the RBI Monetary statement on 6 […]
Read More High Policy rates sans supporting fiscal policy cannot tame inflationAssociating budgetary allocations with cultural tropes is one way of validating them. Consider the case of two Indian states, joined at the hip till 1960 — Gujarat and Maharashtra. The origins of the 1960 split The port city of Surat in Gujarat was the entrepôt for Western India and the link with Arabia and beyond […]
Read More Culture drives how States Spend Public money
Opinion India 