The Times of India

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

Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently reiterated his call for an “uncompromising mission-mode approach” to cleanse the polluted Ganga. This is the wrong way forward. We do not need the battering-ram approach of yet another government mission, but new institutions with long-term

When Lee Kwan Yew became Singapore’s first prime minister in 1959, its per capita income was $400. Today, it is $55,000. No other country has gone so fast from rags to riches. Yet in the Nehru-Indira era, Indian socialists viewed

Green activists have long gained fame and fortune by campaigning against genetically modified foods, which they denounce as “monster foods” that can ruin traditional agriculture and decimate the human race. They claim scientists that splice genes from one organism into