Articles: 2019

The economic growth for the past three years has declined from 8.2 to 7.2 to 7.0 percent. The latest quarterly growth rate is 6.6 percent, and the January to March quarter data will be published in a couple of weeks. So, this declining trend continues, and for the fourth year in a row, India will... read more

There are a host of considerations that rule, and not all of them are easily fathomed by city folk who tend to prefer the so-called national parties and pre-set alliances. Some of these dynamics are now opening up the reading, tentative, early and not backed up well, that the SP-BSP combine is... read more

The rise of Hindutva in a country that was thought to be largely secular has flummoxed many. Whatever the outcome of this general election, the BJP and its parent, the RSS, will remain important players and influence the political agenda in a manner they never had been able to before 2014. This is... read more

Even for those who might have held Rajiv Gandhi culpable in the mass of allegations around the Bofors gun, his death brought that conversation to an end. That is the Indian way – not to speak ill of the dead, to forgive and to let bygones be bygones.

In less than a month we will have elected the seventeenth Lok Sabha. The seat tally across parties will determine who gets to form the next government. Since exit polls have been banned during the six week long national elections, we can’t depend on feedback from those who have already voted. The... read more

About two years ago, Stanford University’s Dr. John P AIoannidis, who currently is considered the most-cited physician, wrote in the prestigious Journal of Clinical Epidemiology: “Under market pressure, clinical medicine has been transformed to finance-based medicine…In many... read more

Facing a charge of sexual misconduct, the CJI can convene a bench of three male justices, including himself, invite the Attorney General to speak on his behalf, admonish the press for sensationalising the event, accuse politicians of fabricating the episode, not have anyone represent the victim or... read more

India is dealing with a serious crisis of employment despite achieving higher than global average rates of GDP growth consistently for many years. The crisis has many dimensions, some of which are low real wage growth, a proliferation of insecure jobs, high rates of unemployment among the educated... read more

Iconic visions of Industry 4.0 are robots and self-driving cars that will eliminate human workers, and 3-D printers that can compress the capabilities of a large factory with hundreds of skilled workers into a small machine operated by a single person. A broader view of Industry 4.0 includes the... read more

The latest data for March shows the inflation rate to be 2.86 percent. The average inflation during the last fiscal year which ended in March is about 3.5 percent. This has been a remarkable success story, the credit for which should go jointly to the Reserve Bank of India and the NDA government.... read more

The headline retail inflation measured in terms Consumer Price Index —Combined (CPI-C) has trended downward since September 2018 and reached 2.0 per cent in January 2019 on a year-on-year basis. This is the floor for retail inflation legislatively mandated under the Flexible Inflation Targeting (... read more

April 13 is a dark day in India’s colonial history. This year, it marks the 100th anniversary of the brutal Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar, where Brigadier General Reginald Dyer opened fire on thousands of unarmed Indians, who had peacefully congregated in the Bagh on Baisakhi day as a mark... read more

Yet, somewhere along the heat and dust, unsaid, unmarked and unexplained, the BJP narrative has begun to falter and look tired while the Congress narrative is beginning to look decent if not good and at times even inspiring. This may or may not mean much for the Lok Sabha election results. A host... read more

The Monetary Policy Committee in its first bi- monthly resolution on April 4, 2019 for the current fiscal has reduced the policy repo rate by 25 basis points. Two months earlier on February 07, 2019 the MPC made the same rate cut of 25 basis points. Thus, cumulatively, there has been a rate cut of... read more

There was no surprise this time. As widely expected, the MPC of the RBI cut the policy repo rate by 25 basis points to 6% in its first bi-monthly meeting this fiscal by a 4-2 vote. The policy stance has been kept unchanged at ‘neutral’. Interestingly, the two MPC members who opposed the rate cut... read more

There is much debate on the Indian National Congress campaign promise of NYAY – justice in English but in Hindi an acronym for ‘Nyuntam Aay Yojana’, or the Minimum Guarantee Scheme, under which the poorest 20 per cent households would receive Rs.72,000 per annum if the proposal turns into policy.... read more

The Congress party announced that if elected to form the next government, it would implement a Nyuntam Aay Yojana (NYAY), which will transfer Rs 72,000 as cash income annually to the bottom fifth of the poorest families. The acronym NYAY means justice. The implication is that this “injustice”... read more

One of the important objectives of demonetisation was to discourage the use of cash and to check the amount of “currency in circulation” and thus reduce the flow of black money in the system. “Currency in circulation” is an important measure in that sense and has been used by the government to... read more

When Boeing developed their latest-generation B737MAX, to keep their half-century old best-selling single-aisle airliner contemporary, they introduced new technology that was not available on earlier variants, in order to further enhance its air safety. It was called the Manoeuvring Characteristics... read more

The ball has been set rolling for the world’s biggest election. About 900 million voters, will go to a million booths, to elect 545 members of the Lower House of Parliament, from among 10,000 candidates. It’s an exercise which will span 11 weeks, a time during which the model code of conduct will... read more