Articles

The Joint Parliamentary Committee reviewing the proposed land acquisition law has asked for suggestions from the public. I suggest that the law’s thrust must shift from compulsory acquisition to leasing. This will benefit all concerned — farmers, governments and project […]

The Modi government has laid much stress on its “Make in India“ campaign. After all, he won the election by promising jobs galore through rapid indus trial growth. However, industrial jobs are not growing fast anywhere in the world. Modern

Last week’s column cited news reports of The Times of India and Economic Times in which businessmen and bureaucrats agreed almost unanimously that big corruption had fallen dramatically under Narendra Modi. But Rahul Gandhi says that Modi heads a suited-booted

Narendra Modi’s biggest achievement in his first year in office is, arguably, a huge reduction in big corruption (involving top politicians and industrialists). Hard data on corruption doesn’t exist, so assessments can be subjective and incomplete. But for the most

Former BJP minister Arun Shourie has lambasted Narendra Modi as directionless in policy. He says Modi’s haphazard, inconsistent and half-hearted reforms send conflicting signals. A prime minister must not move project by project or slogan by slogan: he must have

The vast majority of suicides are of non farmers. Why are their deaths treated as lesser tragedies than those of farmers? Because presenting farm suicides as a single mass tragedy can win awards for journalists, TRPs for TV anchors, donations

Rahul Gandhi wants to escalate the suicide of a farmer at a Delhi AAP rally into a national election issue, painting Modi as pro-industrialist and anti-farmer. Mamata Banerjee leveraged resentment against land acquisition in Singur and Nandigram to unseat the Marxist government in West Bengal. Can Rahul

Finance minister Arun Jaitley has used the spring meeting of the IMF-World Bank to tom-tom the economic performance of the BJP government. At the Peterson Institute, he said: “In late 2013, India was teetering on the edge of a macro-economic

Delhi’s air pollution is terrible. The National Green Tribunal (NGT) has banned diesel vehicles more than 10 years old, having already banned petrol vehicles over 15 years old. But IIT Professor Dinesh Mohan has revealed that old vehicles constitute a