(photocredit: ndtv.com) Secretary Chuck Hagel’s whirl-wind India visit, ending August 9, highlights the tight rope India needs to walk, whilst enlarging its defence establishment’s collaborative engagement with the external world. The opening up of defence production to the private sector, including foreign direct investment, is a sensible, hard-headed, no-brainer, business decision given India’s current volume […]

Read More Can India choose its defence challenges?

 (Photo credit: Oneindia)   .Neo-liberal public intellectuals and foreign service babus in Lutyens Delhi are not happy with PM Modi’s “South Asia First” policy. For long, the managerial incentive was to hobnob with the “sahib log (people)” of the G 20. A predominantly rich country club, in which India is the poorest member. After all, […]

Read More Hiccups in India’s new external engagement framework

(photo credit:www.voices.halabol.com) How close is India to achieving the PM’s vision of “cooperative federalism”? Very far I would say on current trends. Federalism itself is a distant goal, cooperative, or otherwise. There are too many unitary features in our constitution to qualify us as a federation. Just to list a few; (1) the vertically higher […]

Read More PM Modi’s “Cooperative federalism”; distant vision or national glue?

  photo credit: news.nationalpost.com The ability of a sovereign to levy and collect tax sustainably, on an equitable basis and without overt coercion is a sound measure of the strength of the “social compact” between the State and citizens. In India, the “social compact” is weak partly due to our colonial past but mostly due […]

Read More Tax Policy & Corruption in India

PM Modi has gone to great lengths to get the Principal Secretary of his choice. Institutional “purists” may cavil at his amending the TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) law to enable the individual to work in government post retirement from the position of Chairman TRAI. But viewed from the perspective of optics this is […]

Read More The Sahib and his Officer

FM Jaitley presented a soft budget with a hard Fiscal Deficit target. Such miracles can only happen if supported by “tricks”.  One such trick could be to fund the increased expenditure, over 2013-14, of around Rs 100,000 crores (Rs 10,000 billion) through a fast track resolution of the Rs  400,000 crores in tax arbitration. This […]

Read More Jaitley’s budget tricks flop

The “Jaitley-Modi” team is working out to be invincible. Who, amongst the chattering classes, would have conceded, even as late as May 1, that Modi could transform himself from a hands-on, salt-of-the-earth, provincial, micro manager,  into a suave opinion maker, at perfect ease trading handshakes (though not yet air kissing) with the international jet set? […]

Read More The JaMo; an unbeatable combination

  Every hero has a side kick. Sadananda Gowda, the Railway Minister, is to Jaitley, what Mac Mohan “Sambha” was to the lovable “Gabbar” Amjad Khan, sadly however minus Mac’s trademark “skunk” hair dye, in the Sippy blockbuster “Sholay”- Gowda’s Railway Budget on July 8 is the teaser to Jaitley’s big event two days later. […]

Read More Railway budget: “Sambha’s” side show