An unprecedented official letter written by D. Kempanna, president of the Karnataka State Contractors Association (KSCA) to the PMO (prime minister’s office), Delhi, complaining that civil engineering proprietaries and firms in Karnataka that execute civic projects for the state and municipal governments are being forced to pay bribes of 30-40 percent of their project fees, […]
The leisurely pace at which slothful bureaucratic public sector enterprises (PSEs) are being privatised is costing the public heavily in terms of loss production and high prices. A case in point is the public sector Oil & Natural Gas Co Ltd (ONGC) which has totally belied its early promise.
The centenary birth anniversary of Dr. Verghese Kurien, the brilliant visionary who engineered India’s White Revolution (1960-80s) that transformed chronically milk deficient India into the world’s largest producer thereof, was grudgingly celebrated by way of a few paid ads in the Times of India.
Given the posthumous encomiums showered upon him these days, it’s difficult to […]
There’s something disquieting about the increasing number of US-based NRI academics, taking leave of absence from tenured professorships in American universities to play advisory roles in the Central government, enjoy public adulation and exaggerated respect for a few years in India before they scarper back to tolerance and condescension abroad.
For sheer hypocrisy and two-facedness, the English are hard to beat. And to all intents and purposes, compradors vending their goods in this country seem to have learned their lessons well.
Take for example, the latest ad campaign for Dove soap manufactured and marketed by Hindustan Unilever, the India subsidiary of the London/Amsterdam FMCG (fast moving […]
There’s considerable merit in the simile that official corruption is like an ice-berg. Only one-tenth of it above the surface of water is visible to the naked eye. The massive dangerous body of corruption is invisible underwater. In the circumstances, one wonders about the sheer scale of official corruption in Maharashtra, India’s second most populous […]
Even as India’s frontline businessmen and new genre entrepreneurs are working overtime to revive the economy after the Covid-19 disruption, the country’s Left politicians and fellow travellers in the academy continue to vent their ire — especially on social media — against business leaders taking big risks to kick-start the sputtering economy and make good […]
There’s a world of difference between the billionaires of the world’s largest democracies. In the US, entrepreneurs who rise above the herd are empathetic towards their less capable brethren left behind. This empathy prompts magnanimity. They make large contributions to charities, trusts and their alma maters. On the other hand, India’s new rich rarely sympathise […]
News reports that India’s property market has revived to pre-pandemic levels haven’t been given sufficient publicity. According to Knight Frank, an internationally respected real estate consultancy firm, in the July-September quarter, 12.5 million sq. ft of office space and 64,000 homes were sold. Although ex facie, these numbers are impressive, the residential units sold in […]
Common-sense dictates that when MNCs (multinational corporations) contract offshore deals, the capital gain if any, accrues beyond Indian jurisdiction. Yet circa 2010, by convoluted reasoning for which India’s income tax department is infamous, it calculated pro rata capital gains for 17 MNCs including Vodafone, Netherlands and Cairn Energy (UK), levying capital gains tax on their […]
The Indian cricket team’s comprehensive mid-August victory over England in the second Test played at Lords, London, the sport’s most hallowed ground worldwide, marks an inflection point in the history of Indian cricket. For the first time ever, all 20 wickets in England’s two innings were taken by Indian pace bowlers hitherto routinely dismissed as […]
In almost all human capital development indices including the Education Development Index of NIEPA University, Delhi and UNDP’s Human Development Index, the picturesque southern state of Kerala (pop.35 million) is invariably accorded high praise. This is because during the past seven decades since independence, the state has attained 99 percent literacy. The high status […]
ON THE SUBJECT OF HARD-KNUCKLED industry tycoons who brazenly decline to discharge their IOUs, Ratan Tata (RT), currently chairman emeritus of the Tata Group, takes the prize. Several decades ago when the chairmanship of Tata Sons — holding company of the Tata Group — was up for grabs on the passing of the highly-respected J.R.D. […]
THE RETIREMENT WITH EFFECT FROM MAY 1 of Rahul Bajaj (RB) from his exalted position as chairman and chief executive of Bajaj Auto Ltd (BAL), marks the end of an era of combative, bare-knuckled, me-first capitalism in Indian industry. As founding editor of Business India and later Businessworld, your correspondent was well-acquainted with RB and […]
THE RETIREMENT WITH EFFECT FROM MAY 1 of Rahul Bajaj (RB) from his exalted position as chairman and chief executive of Bajaj Auto Ltd (BAL), marks the end of an era of combative, bare-knuckled, me-first capitalism in Indian industry. As founding editor of Business India and later Businessworld, your correspondent was well-acquainted with RB and […]
Public Memory is short and television memory even shorter, not more than a 24-hour news cycle. On June 14, few of India’s 403 news television channels remembered that it was the first death anniversary of Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput. This promising young movie star’s death, initially reported as suicide, transformed into a CBI murder […]
The phenomenal popularity of the French television series Lupin produced by Netflix, which chalked up a viewership of 76 million in the first quarter of this year, is arguably an inflection point in race relations around the world. In most European countries, including France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain and Denmark, Lupin topped the popularity charts […]
Despite Official claims to the contrary, for ease of doing business or conducting an honest enterprise, post-independence India is one of the world’s most difficult countries. Even running an education institution which by definition is in the public interest, is a very difficult vocation. Under Indian beggar-thy-neighbour socialism, private school and college promoters and managements […]
I write this obituary with a heavy heart. Dr. Bijaya Sahoo, promoter-chairman of the Bhubaneswar-based SAI International Education Group, comprising the Sai International School (SIS, estb.2008), Sai Angan Preschool (reportedly the largest pre-primary in Asia, estb.2015), Sai International College of Commerce (2015) and Sai International Residential School (2018), all new millennium, globally benchmarked institutions with […]
The acquittal by a Mapusa Goa-based sessions court of Tarun Tejpal, publisher-editor of Tehelka, the once well-known investigative journalism magazine, on a rape charge on May 21, has come as a slap in the face of the monstrous regiment of women whose full-time occupation is to instigate gender wars. Now eight years after the incident, […]
The Tragic loss of 66 lives of skilled permanent and contract employees of ONGC (Oil & Natural Gas Corporation), the country’s largest crude oil and gas exploration and drilling company, who were drowned at sea on May 17, has all the fingerprints of gross negligence and bureaucratic sloth for which the country’s 348 government-run public […]
According to a World Bank 2020 Report, India has improved its ranking by 79 positions in its Ease of Doing Business index in five years (2014-19). Currently it is ranked 63rd among 190 nations. However, this report finds few takers in India Inc. In private, industry leaders are unanimous that doing legit business in India […]
The appointment of Dr. Mahesh Rangarajan, a former journalist and respected environmentalist as vice chancellor of Krea University, sited in Sri City (Andhra Pradesh), a two-hour drive from Chennai, offers the institution the chance to make a new beginning after a damp squib start. Krea University was established in 2018 with high hopes as India’s […]
It’s a sign of the times. When a politician succumbs to the thousand unnatural shocks that flesh is heir to, the evil they have done is dressed up as good. But the good of the truly good is interred with their bones.
These musings came to mind upon hearing about the untimely demise of litterateur, editor, […]
One of the few upsides of the Coronavirus pandemic is that foreign travel curbs and extensive testing of outbound and incoming travellers, has cured not a few nouveau citizens of vacations-abroad mania. Perhaps because of drastic foreign exchange purchase controls imposed on citizens for over four decades in the heyday of neta-babu socialism to conserve […]
The resignation of insightful and widely admired public intellectual Dr. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, star columnist of the multi-editions Indian Express, from the faculty of the high-profile crowd-funded Ashoka University (AU), Sonipat (Delhi NCR), has severely dented the carefully curated reputation of this new genre private liberal arts university. AU was promoted in 2014 with the […]
On the issue of regulation of the tuition and other fees of private independent (‘unaided’) schools by state governments which has become a hot button subject lately, the stand of your editors has been clear and unambiguous. The decision to determine chargeable fees is of school promoters/management and is a contractual agreement between parents of […]
The exoneration on February 17 of columnist Priya Ramani by a Delhi sessions court in a criminal defamation case filed against her by once much-celebrated author and hitherto cabinet minister in the BJP/NDA government at the Centre, has further damaged the already tattered reputation of M.J. Akbar, who over four decades had built a reputation […]
The BJP/NDA government’s transformation of the puerile tweets of two girls hardly out of their teens into a vast international conspiracy to topple the government of India with a defence establishment comprising over 1,100,000 personnel and a nuclear arsenal at its command, exposes the small-town patriarchal mind-set of its leadership. In the almost one million […]
The unwritten rule and convention of Indian journalism is dog doesn’t eat dog. Despite fierce competition for advertising and readership, the established norm of Indian media is to refrain from direct criticism and ridicule. However, sometimes exceptions have to be made to this rule of media propriety.
For the past few years, an enterprise operating under […]
One of the most regularly advanced arguments in favour of the BJP/NDA government at the Centre by its fervent supporters is that compared to the Congress-led UPA-I and UPA-II governments (2004-14), which were neck-deep in corruption, it is pristine pure.
However, the Berlin-based Transparency International (TI), an independent NGO which measures the incidence of public corruption […]
With hundreds of millions of industry professionals and business people obliged to work from home and schools and higher education institutions shut down for months on end, OTT (defined “as a means of providing television and film content over the Internet at the request and to suit the requirements of the individual consumer”) content providers […]
The Indian cricket team’s 2-1 series win against Australia and particularly the January 19 triumph at Brisbane’s Gabba cricket ground on which no visiting team has won a match since 1988, was indeed a famous victory. Especially after the visiting Indian team was bowled out for 36 in the first test match in Adelaide, the […]
In the income tax department under the Union finance ministry, arrogance mixed with intellectual inertia is discernible in abundance. The destructive power that the department enjoys is on full display in the Vodafone and Cairn Energy cases in which highly reputed international tribunals have held against the Government of India for acts of omission […]
Some people — actually the majority — never learn. Right until 1980, some pundits say 1990, the GDP of the neighbouring — too close for comfort — People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Republic of India was on a par. Three decades later, PRC’s GDP is $15 trillion and India’s $3 trillion. That’s because from […]
Is India the most over-taxed country of the contemporary world? If one adds up all the taxes paid by the tiny fraction of the upper and middle classes (only 14.6 million citizens earn over Rs.5 lakh per year) obliged to pay income tax, it is arguable that India is the world’s most over-taxed nation.
Although it is the nation’s proud boast that India is the world’s most populous (not largest) democracy, evidence is mounting that the idealistically heroic decision to introduce universal adult franchise when a mere 12 percent of the population was literate, was an error. Since 1951 when post-independence India’s first General Election was held, gullible, uneducated […]
A series of heavy fines decreed by state governments for minor civic offences such as not wearing face masks or jumping a traffic light, which far from deterring offenders, has had the adverse effect of increasing retail police corruption manifold.
In the garden city of Bangalore — the state’s rustic politicians have senselessly surrendered the global […]
By any metric of man measurement, new technologies industry leader Faqir Chand Kohli (FCK) who passed away on November 26 was an extraordinary individual who made a huge, insufficiently appreciated, contribution to the national development effort. An alumnus of Punjab University and MIT, Boston where he studied engineering, unlike many of his generation in the […]
The IT (information technology) and ITES (IT enabled services) industry is widely propagated — and is by Indian standards — the best growth and development story of post-liberalisation (1991) India. But it hasn’t realised its full potential because IT companies are replete with penny-wise pound foolish techies with little awareness of the brand-building value of […]
The West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC) has issued a notification for the recruitment of 35,726 assistant teachers in classes 9–10 and 11–12 in state-aided .....Read More
A day after the Karnataka government rolled out a suspension order against a government school teacher who protested for classrooms for students in his school, .....Read More
