governance, political economy, institutional development and economic regulation
Javed Akhtar’s response to the “Bharat Mata ki Jai” controversy stoked by Asaduddin Owaisi — the member of Parliament from Hyderabad — was just what was needed to pour oil on the dangerously choppy course our politics has taken. And there is no joy to be had in justifying this trend by pointing to the […]
Read More Owning IndiaArvind Subramanian Chief Economic Advisor- GOI: Rising star and Rajan clone? The Indian Economic Survey is an annual document that is wrongly titled. The data it reveals is overpowered by large dollops of economic wisdom, literature and policy analysis. Arvind Subramanian, India’s Chief Economic Advisor and the key author of this year’s Survey, has clearly […]
Read More Indian Economic Survey 2016: Bewinderingly optimisticWill Finance Minister Arun Jaitley protect wailing babies; photo credit: mubasshir.blogspot.com High expectations in the near mystical ability of any finance minister to find a balm for all economic ills is common across all Budgets. Like all of us, finance ministers are egoists. They respond to expectations, like a supermom does to wailing babies. The chorus […]
Read More Finance Minister or supermomSuresh Prabhu: An accountant in politics. India’s most affable politician: Photo credit: samacharplus.com Even as Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu was presenting the Railway Budget 2016-17, the overriding impression was of a person pressed for time- not just the speech – more than double the length of last year’s- but also to fit his vision into […]
Read More Rail budget 2016: long on potential, short on reformFinance minister Arun Jaitley’s third Budget signals the mid-point of this government’s tenure till 2019. At the best of times, the honeymoon period would have ended by now. Photo credit: in.news.yahoo.com But it is unfortunate that the FM has to face a perfect storm of snowballing, fiscal liabilities in public sector banks; drought induced low […]
Read More Indian budget in the eye of a fiscal stormBad ideas are as resilient as cockroaches — the only living being guaranteed to survive even a nuclear holocaust. Both have a tendency to resurface even after being squashed. One such bad idea, originating from the Niti Aayog, is to revive the plan of special economic zones (SEZ) on a much larger scale as a […]
Read More NitiAyog’s China style CEZs a big, bad ideaR.S. Sharma the new TRAI chairperson and architect of “ersatz socialism” in the www. Photo credit: economic times.com By ruling against Facebook’s Free Basics type of innovation, which offers, hitherto undreamed of, free but limited access to data services, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has regressed to a version of “ersatz Nehruvian socialism”, which […]
Read More TRAI’s ersatz socialism kills innovationThe latest public “dog and pony show”, unveiled on Thursday in Delhi, is the selection of 20 cities across the richest 11 states of India for accessing the governments Smart Cities fund. Photo credit: smartcitiesindia.com The near-complete exclusion of the poor “cow belt” states, except Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, can be explained by the need […]
Read More SmartCities: Making the rich smarterYou have to hand it to the French. They look effortlessly stylish- think Christine Lagarde, the French Managing Director of the IMF. Even when they wear plain work clothes they come encased in an inherited frisson of elegance- the 1789 French revolution, it seems, diffused aristocratic elegance more evenly rather than destroying it all together, as […]
Read More President Hollande’s musings on IndiaEven as Davos was worrying over the haemorrhage of international capital from emerging markets and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley was at pains to point out that India was different, a different narrative was unfolding in the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) in Delhi. It had to do with a consultation paper issued by TRAI […]
Read More TRAI: Misplaced rage against Facebook
Opinion India 