governance, political economy, institutional development and economic regulation
Deepak Gupta’s book is not a quickie, neither to read, nor would it appear, to write, from the diligent research that has gone into it. The best read book in this genre has been Phillip Mason’s The Men Who Ruled India (1954) — a racy account of the British administration in India, by one of […]
Read More Book Review : Keeping the barbarians at bay“The Great Smog of India”, Siddharth Singh’s book, is in the genre of everything-the-intelligent-person should know about air pollution in India. It’s attractively written with an easy, breezy style. It instantly sets the reader at ease that she is not about to be inundated with complicated scientific models and graphs about climate change. The author […]
Read More Book Review: North India’s smoggy futureIndia is a young nation. Three fourths of us probably have no recollection of the ravages of the Emergency period from January 1975 to March 1977. This book was first published in 1977, just after the national elections, called by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi – in a bout of self-delusion as a referendum on the […]
Read More Book Review: For Reasons of StateThe great Mughals (16th to 18th century) found it more difficult to manage their extended zenanas than to conquer fractious Hindustani kingdoms. The insidious politicking and power struggles of the women in purdah are well known. Less well appreciated are the strength, stability and support that the zenana afforded to the emperor, as a […]
Read More India’s elite bureaucrats – unshakably resilientThree themes undergird the author’s exhaustive narrative of the politics around foreign aid in India between 1950 and 1975, during the early years of the Cold War — the people who made key decisions; the domestic context and, finally, the geopolitical incentives that shaped donor responses. The deal makers Indian officials come across as being surprisingly […]
Read More Book Review: Paying the price for aidBimal Jalan exercises the writer’s privilege to box his reflections between three inflection points. The first is 1980, ostensibly because 1977-79 was the first time the Congress lost power at the Centre. The second is 2000, being the start of a new millennium. And 2014 is the bookend when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National […]
Read More Bimal Jalan reflectsBOOK REVIEW India Transformed 25 years of Economic Reforms Rakesh Mohan – edited Penguin Viking 670 pages; Rs 999 Curating 31 essays into a story on India’s economic reforms can be a giant yawn. But Rakesh Mohan, a videshi economist and a veteran of four major government committee reports, is up to the challenge. THE PLUMBING WHICH […]
Read More Well begun is half doneBOOK REVIEW : Reddy, Sheela. Mr and Mrs Jinnah: The Marriage that Shook India Penguin Random House India, 2017. 464 pp. Sheela Reddy has a winner in this deftly crafted and diligently researched work on the life and times of Rattanbai Petit Jinnah. But this is not a racy read to be completed on the flight from […]
Read More The Parsi who abducted JinnahBOOK REVIEW Rethinking Public Institutions in India Devesh Kapur, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Milan Vaishnav (Eds) Oxford University Press 548 pages; Rs 995 Public institutional reform has a stale air about it. There are plenty of options but little action. The sombre packaging of this book adds to this gloom. Possibly, the “monkish”, value-for-money branding is […]
Read More India’s pressured public institutionsShashi Tharoor’s latest book originated in a debate at Oxford on whether Britain should pay reparations to its erstwhile colonies. The YouTube clip of Tharoor systematically demolishing the opposition, his brilliance evident in the thrust and parry of debate, has been watched by more than three million viewers. But the author says he felt a […]
Read More Book review: Tharoor, An era of darkness