governance, political economy, institutional development and economic regulation
The future of work is uncertain. Within this global conundrum, India has a peculiar problem. The International Labor Organization estimates that less women in India are opting to work. In 1990 there two men for every woman in the workplace. Now there are three men for every woman in the workplace. Despite women becoming better […]
Read More How Ivanka Trump can revive our exports and create jobsFormer Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, recently released a book titled India Transformed — 25 years of Economic Reform, edited by Rakesh Mohan, at the appropriately historic Nehru Memorial Library. After the obligatory photo-op, Dr Singh turned to finance minister Arun Jaitley and with a beatific smile, handed the book over to him, as if, symbolically, […]
Read More FM Jaitley, aim for the sweet spotNITI vision 2032 : foggy, disjointed & barely hanging together Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the chief ministers of states spent most of Sunday deliberating over the plans and prospects for India in the next 15 years to 2031-32. The third governing council meeting of the Niti Aayog seems to have been an underwhelming affair, […]
Read More NITI’s vision 2032 disappointsIrrespective of its economic virtues, demonetisation — an aggressive, unprecedented initiative of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, brought rich dividends for the BJP in the Uttar Pradesh election. Above all, voters were impressed with his determination to punish those who have become fat on black money. That the move also “punished” those who had no black […]
Read More Basic income transfer- Modi’s next big thing?Do Indian voters remain deeply aligned with caste, clan and community (read religious) interests, as reported in the ongoing state elections? Possibly, yes, they do. Continued allegiance to traditional identities makes sense, if new ones never had the chance to take root. Industrial work was one such silo-buster, as is urbanisation. Both, have had a […]
Read More New social compact : wooing the underdogsSome pictures may be worth a thousand words. But when the two are put together, as in a video, they evoke deep emotions and convey subliminal messages. Watch the master of the spoken word — Barack Obama, in his January 2016 address on the mundane subject of gun control in the United States and you […]
Read More Budget 2017 – say what you meanR.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 innovationBeing workaholics and 24×7 people, Team Modi must be avid coffee drinkers, with a yen for espresso. For the uninitiated, espresso is the end product of forcing boiling water through ground coffee, thereby concentrating the caffeine content and enhancing the “kick”. photo credit: http://www.utube.com India’s “espresso” moment happened last Saturday in New Delhi with the […]
Read More Startups: Keep the adrenalin flowing(photo credit; namakkal.tn.nic.in) Prime Minister Modi, addressing the civil service officers, last week, made three telling points. First, he asked the bureaucracy to shrug off the inhibitions of the past and think big and assured that resource constraint would not limit them. Second, he exhorted the bureaucracy to change citizens’ perception of babudom by personal […]
Read More PM to babus: Learn to work with “plentiful resources” for social and human development
Opinion India 