(photo credit: rediff.com) Energy development, because of its scale and complexity, only happens when “deals” are struck between governments and developers. Some deals are better than others. From the public policy perspective the “deals” we should be looking for, are those which minimize “rents” and maximize welfare. In the Indian context, Independent Regulation is best […]

Acquiring property in tony Panchsheel Park, New Delhi is every middle class Punjabi, Kalal,  refugee, boy’s dream. It came true for me today just shy of 62-never mind that the apartment is old; that one walks up the stairs to the second floor; the floor is cracked mosaic; the wash basin is below and not […]

(photo credit:southasia.foreignpolicy.com)  FM Jaitley’s comments recently in Mumbai, that the media did not know much about what happens inside government, riled many a media person. Expectedly, the comment was attributed variously to smugness and being out of touch with the intimacy, the media has got used to in the “chummy’ days of the UPA, when […]

(photo credit: english.sina.com) You don’t have to say you are sorry. Japan took half a century to sort of apologise to Korea for its war crimes. The US has never apologized to the Vietnamese for napalming them. You can lie with impunity. The US and the UK lied about Saddam Hussain’s arsenal of chemical and nuclear […]

(photo credit: en.wikipedia.org) Samson, the mythical Israeli, who was born with the strength to rip apart a lion with his bare hands, loses it all, when Delilah, an unreliable female “partner”, in whom he confides that the source of his strength lay in his long hair, cuts them off, in exchange for “blood money” from […]

(photocredit: unrealtimes.com) In inimitable style, Prime Minister Modi freed the nation from the “stifling” control of the Planning Commission (PC) on August 15-India’s Independence Day.  Not many are likely to mourn its passing. But bureaucracies dislike a power vacuum and it is not clear who inherits the mantle of work the Commission used to do. […]