Its economic growth is stalling. So it may be time for India to squeeze more productivity out of its large, poor, sleepy and over-subsidized agricultural sector. Unlike China, India forgot to urbanize, researchers at Gavekal point out in a note. And the first step of urbanization should have been land reform. Industrial economies often get there by handing farmers […]
The whole world is watching China‘s confrontations in the South China Sea and the East China Sea—but India is watching with particular concern. India has no territorial claims here per se, but one Indian official recently said that the South China Sea could be seen “as the antechamber of the Indian Ocean,” given the flow […]
HER voice is high and birdlike. Tiny, she is fond of finger wagging. Her party, the Trinamool Congress, has just 19 of the national parliament’s 543 elected members. She offers little beyond vague talk of the “common man”, and after a year running West Bengal she looks ill-at-ease in office. Yet Mamata Banerjee feels she […]
What was most significant about the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) Summit that was held in Tehran recently was that almost all of its 120 members gathered there in the face of U.S., allied western nations and Israeli attempts to pressure and isolate Iran to abandon parts of its nuclear programme. Great pressure was even brought on […]
Foreign direct investment (FDI) in the retail sector has been at the epicentre of national debate. Much has been said on India possibly losing out on investment by sending a wrong policy signal. But do we really need to get so worked up? Considering the anticipated level of inflows on account of FDI in retail, there […]
Building ‘capitalism with Indian characteristics’ means decisions cannot ignore concerns of voters and communities, says Siddharth Vardarajan As the economy slows down and the rupee wilts, Manmohan Singh has bitten the ‘reforms’ bullet with both eyes on the credit rating agencies whose negative reports have done much to dampen the ‘animal spirits’ of investors, foreign […]
Yet, it was what an unblinking Manmohan Singh said sotto voce, and what he left tantalisingly unsaid, that may be more politically significant. In the spaces between his prepared speech, what he was effectively saying was that what the country needs is more of the reforms that former Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao unleashed in 1991 (with Manmohan Singh as […]
The tragedy of India is not the explosion that we have witnessed in the visual media. The tragedy is the complete disconnect that exists between the media and the reality on the ground. The plight of the people in the left wing extremism affected villages is not even the concern of the media at the […]
India has taken two important decisions for stepping up its defense cooperation with the Maldives, a country situated in the Indian Ocean. This is significant when considering China’s recently-enlarged strategic footprint in the area. To begin with, the Indian government has decided to station a Defense Attaché at Male, the capital of Maldives. Additionally, India has […]
A strong argument in favour of FDI in mammoth retail is that it will generate employment. Surely, it will. But we can’t let the question lie there. We must ask, for whom? Will it source employees from the unskilled, illiterate vegetable vendors who, akin to a capillary network, are spread across the length and breadth […]
