governance, political economy, institutional development and economic regulation
India 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 StateSafeguarding your privacy from government and the use of your data by companies without asking you or paying you explicitly, are current concerns, even in under developed India, where more than one half of the population remains effectively unhooked to the internet because of patchy service in low population density areas. The proposed solutions are […]
Read More Data protection – new challenges but lame solutionsProf. Ashutosh Varshney of Brown University calls India an improbable democracy — poor, impossibly heterogeneous and multicultural, and ironically, only its colonial heritage keeps it going. So has our hubris cost us plenty? Why we are not China Forget comparing ourselves with China today. Are we at least on the same path? No, we are […]
Read More The price of democracyKhichdi – Risotto if you prefer the Italian version – is a traditional palliative for Delhi belly. But Delhi’s khichdi style political governance systems are guaranteed to give anybody the runs. So bad is the mess that it is difficult to find out who rules Delhi. The Delhi Government, a contender, appealed against orders of […]
Read More Who rules Delhi?The 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 resilientPiyush Goyal, the interim finance minister, will need to be a lucky general if he is to overcome the triple challenge of widening trade and fiscal deficits and lacklustre private investment. Exports – India’s achilles heel Despite our comparative advantage of cheap, skilled labour and entrepreneurial zeal, export pessimism is endemic — unlike in China. […]
Read More Follow the money to tackle the fiscal perfect stormThree 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 aidIf Marwaris and Banias could fund our Freedom Struggle why not heritage preservation?
Read More Are Marwaris taking over our heritage monuments?Maharajakrishna Rasgotra, India’s foreign secretary from 1982 to 1985, records that in 1948, contrary to the popular perception, the wealthy “Doon School wallahs” preferred to join the domestic services, where they could keep an eye on their assets, and that the IFS boys were at a premium only amongst the urbanised, “sophisticated girls of marriageable […]
Read More An “Ambassador” amongst “box wallahs”Unlike politicians, who can choose their targets, business leaders have to dance to the tune of shareholders, who buy or sell, based on the existing or the future bottom line. In politics. it is relatively easy to change the goal posts or indeed, shift the goal itself. Changing goals In India, the current metric for […]
Read More India’s 50-50 reforms
Opinion India 