The Times of India

Foreign visitors frequently ask me for myassessment of India\’s prospects. I tell them that economicmanagement is improving, but governance is deteriorating, and beyond a point deteriorating governance can make good economic management impossible. This has already happened in Bihar: Economic […]

In my youth I first heard of the theory of economic trickle down–that if the rich get richer, the benefits will trickle down to the poor, and so all will benefit. This was supposed to explain why, contrary to Karl

Last week I talked of the concept of social capital–the social glue that enables cohesive communities to pull together, help distressed members, mediate conflicts, penalise deviant behaviour and reward desirable behaviour, far more efficiently and cheaply than government mechanisms. Successful

FIRST, the good news. Environmentalists may tell us that the Indian tiger is getting extinct, but economic data tell us that some Indian states may be emerging as the latest Asian tigers. Take a look at the accompanying table. It

Karl Marx thought that capital was money. Not so, said 20th century economists who said human capital was the driving force behind prosperity, and so emphasised education and health. But neither human nor financial capital can adequately explain why some

LIBERALISERS like Manmohan Singh can take heart from a new Princeton study which shows, contrary to the government\’s statistical methodology, that rural poverty in India declined sharply between ’87-88 and ’93-94. This may influence the debate within the Congress Party

Media reports today talk of drought and water scarcity as though they are the same thing. In fact they are very different. Droughts will come and go, but water scarcity will worsen steadily because of populist policies and poor governance.

MANY institutions in India have gone downhill in the last fifty years. But the Indian Institutes of Technology are an exception. They are centres of excellence that are now recognised as world class. Their graduates are grabbed by multinationals the

H-1B visas, that allow Indian infotech professionals to work in the US, face a new threat — black American professionals are lobbying the US Congress against such visas saying that they are tantamount to racial discrimination. While some Republican legislators

Three major new trends marked the 1990s. The first was the steady displacement of non-sectarian political parties by those based on religion, caste and region. The second was growing maladministration and criminalisation of politics. The third was a shift in