Although the Vajpayee-Musharraf summit failed to produce an agreed statement, many observers claim that considerable progress was made in areas like commercial exchanges or Sir Creek. One draft okayed at the foreign minister level made no mention of Lahore or […]

In the run up to the Vajpyee-Musharraf summit, reams of figures have appeared in the media pertaining to Kashmir. Mostly they are about the number of people killed. Yet everybody seems to keep silent on the most remarkable figure of

The slowdown in the economy and consequential slippage in the tax collection are likely to increase the government\’s market borrowings in this fiscal. In an overall situation, this might not be a good news for the investors, but in short

Humans love horror stories, which is why R.L. Stine is a best-selling author. So I am not surprised by the popularity of horror stories being invented about genetically modified (GM) foods and cotton. A recent news item says, in apocalyptic

I recently read a newspaper report about various ministers not paying their telephone, electricity and rental bills. It was a small news item, not deemed to be of much importance. So many Ministers have failed to pay such bills for

WHEN I wrote two weeks ago in this column about some blunders Enron had made in India, some readers asked if I had changed my mind. We thought you were pro-Enron, they said, so have you turned anti-Enron? I find

The Dabhol saga goes on and on. Most commentators think that Enron took Maharashtra officials for a ride. This is partly true. But it is equally true that Dabhol is a bad deal for Enron. Enron\’s first blunder was to

The last Pay Commission award increased the salaries of government staff by almost 2 per cent of GDP, a wage explosion that sent most states deep into the red. Yet a potentially greater problem is the explosive growth of pensions.

CHENNAI: India has set an ambitious $50 billion target for its textile exports by 2010, union minister of state for textiles Dhananjaya Kumar said on Saturday. This would be achieved through \”modernisation of production process, value addition, increasing productivity and

THE CONGRESS party has done rather well in the state elections, but Sonia Gandhi looks unlikely to come to power at the Centre. The BJP has done rather badly in the state elections, but Atal Bihari Vajpayee can still hope