Swaminomics

For most of history, an agricultural crisis in India has meant scarcity. Today it means excess. We have a foodgrain mountain of over 60 million tones, as well as a mountain of unsold sugar. And unsold cotton stocks are so large so large that the Maharashtra monopoly cotton procurement scheme is bust. The transformation from More >

Green fundamentalists are killers. Their opposition to genetically modified foods is killing people in famine-hit Africa today, and could threaten Indians in the future too. The USA has rushed food aid to southern Africa in the form of maize, the staple diet of the region. But Zambia has refused to distribute this maize to its More >

When Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of Gujarat, decided to launch a Gaurav Yatra (journey of pride for Hindus), it reminded me of another incident which I could not put my finger on. When before, I wondered, had somebody declared that his community’s pride lay in defending mass murder? When before had somebody claimed it was More >

Before the Johannesburg summit on the environment, I was asked what I thought it would achieve. I replied that the amount of hot air generated would surely contribute to rather than solve the problem of global warming. The millions of dollars wasted on the jamboree for 65,000 delegates could have rescued entire districts in Africa More >

Even cynics were shaken when Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray ordered Power Minister Suresh Prabhu to resign on the ground that he was too honest. We are used to the notion that politicians should resign if caught extorting bribes. Never before has a Minister been sacked on the ground that he did not make money More >

The government’s proposal to issue identity cards with machine-readable numbers to all citizens has, predictably, raised angry questions. Do you really want to be known as Citizen 1004762548 ? The Economic Times had a cartoon showing Home Minister Advani stamping the backsides of citizens with bar-codes, of the sort normally stamped on goods sold in More >

Whether the rains revive or not, India faces the worst drought since 1987. If it rains steadily for the next two weeks in drought-hit states, something can be retrieved from the wreckage of the monsoon. Even so rural India will face one of the greatest natural calamities in recent memory. Some readers might think that More >

India needs to withdraw its army from the border quickly. This will reduce the economic costs of war tensions, and consolidate the gains of its spectacular diplomatic success in getting the US to arm-twist President Musharraf into formally renouncing terrorism. At the  height of the war rhetoric earlier this month, I  was  asked   on More >

For decades, I was anguished by the lack of calories for our poor. I believed our nutritionists, who that Indians were seriously underweight, calorie-deprived and physically deformed by malnutrition. I believed it made sense to define our poverty line in terms of the nutritionists’ norm of 2,400 calories per day for rural areas and 2,100 More >

Everybody agrees that there is more to life than money. Yet we measure living standards in rupees. Why? Because measuring non-monetary things may be important but is difficult to do. How do you measure the value of communal peace? Or democracy? We can measure social indicators like health or literacy, but find it difficult to More >

“Free people are not equal (in income). Equal people are not free.” So said a poster at a workshop I once attended of the Centre for Civil Society. It touched a deep truth: democracy is not egalitarian. Two weeks ago, I wrote in these columns that the argument for capitalism and democracy was the same—that More >

These are troubled times. Communal violence in Gujarat continues. Kashmir is on the boil after the assassination of Abdul Ghani Lone and the killing of relatives of Indian soldiers by militants.. Vajpayee is threatening war, Musharraf is threatening to retaliate against any Indian strike, and the troops of both sides have massed on the border. More >

Many people reading about the recent spate of business scandals in the USA may conclude that capitalism is a pretty dreadful system. We have long moaned and groaned about crooked Indian businessmen who inflate profits, hide liabilities, manipulate markets, and break a hundred laws. But the US scandals show that crooked businessmen exist everywhere. This More >