Articles

Keeping a diary can be a dangerous pastime, as the Jain brothers will testify. Yet any businessman or politician worth his salt will tell you that it is simply not possible to operate in a control-cum-kickback raj without keeping meticulous […]

Should rural land ceilings be raised to enable corporate houses to start commercial farming? Prime Minister Deve Gowda thinks so, and so does Mr Jyoti Basu, but agriculture minister Chaturanan Mishra is dead against it. He believes the implemention of

The conventional wisdom in India has long been that the public sector is the locomotive of the economy, pulling the private sector along with it, so if public investment falters, so will private investment. Liberals like me disagree on the

Dear Priyaranjan Das Munshi and Vayalar Ravi At a time when most people are expressing delight at judicial activism to catch crooks in politics, you have expressed dismay. You say the old harmony of relations between the legislature, executive and

Readers are often told by economists that a high fiscal deficit is disastrous. In fact, given India’s political economy, high deficits are in some quick ways proving a blessing. Is India’s high fiscal deficit leading it into a debt trap?

Newspapers carried screaming headlines last week about a sensational new discovery. At a demonstration attended by top scientists, Mr Ramer Pillai boiled a handful of herbs in water with some chemical additives, and produced 600 ml of kerosene. Optimists suddenly

Mother Teresa was an apostle of love. Now, love is a quality consistently undervalued and misunderstood in a world swayed too much by secular economics and anti-poverty schemes. Poor Indians need more money. But they also need more love. We

I welcome the coming era of hostile takeovers of companies. By the end of this year, new takeover guidelines, based on the Bhagwati Committee’s recommendations will be in place, ending the cosy security of inefficient and crooked businessmen who have

I am amused by the spate of post-election articles, some in The Times of India, denouncing the United Front for continuing with the liberalisation (which I regard as half-baked) of the preceding Congress regime. Some writers even claim that the

Five years ago, just after Mr Narasimha Rao came to power, I was asked by St Stephen\’s College to debate the prospects of the new economic reforms with Abhijit Sen, a prominent Left-wing academic. I told the college that the