Articles

For years, Mr P Chidambaram as lurked, with obvious unhappiness, in the shadow of Dr Manmohan Singh. But after his latest budget he has come into his own. He will now be seen as a statesman and visionary in his […]

Taxes, duties cut across the board Despite shortcomings, it is the best budget in decades. Finance minister P Chidambaram has combined global vision with stern expenditure control to perform the ultimate conjuror\’s trick. He has slashed income tax, corporate tax,

IF THE Railways were a company listed on stock markets, its share price would have tumbled after Mr Ram Vilas Paswan\’s performance as its chief executive officer. It is not yet a BIFR case, but is heading in that direction.

EVEN as the GDP growth soared above 7 per cent in 1994-95 and 1995-96, the real wages of unskilled agricultural labour declined, albeit marginally. This suggests, reading between the lines of the Economic Survey, that the poor were left out

There is an old saying about inventions, that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your doorstep. A mousetrap is a device to catch mice. And Deng Xiaoping has replaced the Pied Piper of

There is an old saying about inventions, that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your doorstep. A mousetrap is a device to catch mice. And Deng Xiaoping has replaced the Pied Piper of

The absence of a crisis is usually a non-event. But I think the absence of a foreign exchange crisis this year (1996-97) is big news. When India went bust in 1991, it borrowed from every possible source-IMF, World Bank, and

Last week, Prime Minister Deve Gowda returned from Davos via Mauritius, a bunch of tiny islands off the shore of Africa. A pleasure trip, you might think, to a tourist center run mainly by migrants from India. In fact Mr.

North India is reeling under a power shortage. Yet close by is 83,000 MW of hydroelectric potential in Nepal. This is by far Nepal\’s biggest natural resource, which lies unexploited while its people are mired in poverty. It has a

Traditionally, the best business policy in India was to manipulate netas, babus and markets. Manipulating netas and babus yielded contracts, clearances, and financing from banks and financial institutions. Manipulating stock markets raised money at fancy premia from unsuspecting investors. Those