India’s greatest comparative advantage lies not in manufacturing but in services, says Swaminathan S Aiyar India\’s future lies in services, much more than industry. Most people in India almost automatically equate business with manufacturing. This is plain wrong. The share […]

I showed in this column last week how simple explanations for the Asian currency crisis (like going too fast or liberalising too much) were wrong, and how the lessons from each country were different. The one factor common to all

What lessons should India draw from the Asian currency crisis? Many layfolk believe the tiger economies made the mistake of going too fast, and India should desist from doing so. Prime Minister Inder Gujral has expressed this view more than

The urban educated Indian’s love for the nuclear option is morbid and repudiates the Gandhian heritage, says Swaminathan S Aiyar. In Hiroshima, even the birds seem to fall silent at the A-bomb memorial, built at the site of the nuclear

What does Atal Behari Vajpayee have in common with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair? He, like them, is trying to gain power by stealing the electoral planks of his opponents. I welcome the burglary. Such theft is excellent for society.

All opinion polls put the BJP well in front, within reach of power. So, many opportunists are stampeding to climb onto the BJP bandwagon, not just politicians but generals, business and intellectuals (like the highly mobile Prof MGK Menon). I

Many lessons can be drawn from the events of 1997. One of the saddest is that crooks who function in the dark get away scot free, while people attempting to be transparent are jumped on the harassed. I had originally

India will soon submit its suggestion to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) for a competition policy encompassing trade-related matters. Yet India has no competition policy for internal purposes. Why ensure competition where foreigners are concerned, but not for ourselves? Hypocrisy

The Inder Gujral regime lasted seven months, the Deve Gowda regime ten months. Some people bemoan unstable coalition governments as a curse. I disagree. The 17 months of the United Front produced lots of quarrels and no great feats, yet

Of the many hoary myths floating around, few are so widely believed as the notion that India has been fabulously lucky to get a string of good monsoons in the 1990s. Critics claim this is a lucky fluke that has