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 […]
Despite a long innings in the fourth estate, one has never trusted the so-called professional readership surveys — ABC (Audit Bureau of Circulation) or Indian Readership Survey (IRS). Therefore none of the path-breaking news magazines helmed by your editor — Business India, Businessworld, Debonair and EducationWorld — ever invited the grey men of ABC or […]
Compelling evidence that the great majority of the country’s youth prefer English — or more properly Inglish — as the national language is provided by the 1.6 million higher secondary school-leavers who wrote NEET (National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test), which determines admissions in order of merit into the country’s much-too-few (542) government and private […]
An annual feature of Mumbai (pop. 18 million) — the country’s commercial and financial capital — is the heavy damage caused to the city and its productive citizens by the monsoon rains year after year. This year, according to the Indian Meteorological Department, between June 1 and September 24, Mumbai received 3,679.8 […]
It’s a measure of the degree to which religious communalism and identity poison is spreading within Indian society under rule of the BJP/NDA government, that the Supreme Court mandated CBI investigation into the alleged suicide/murder of rising Bollywood star Sushant Singh Rajput on June 14 has morphed into a covert anti-Muslim and anti-liberals witch-hunt in […]
Even the occasional follower of the US presidency election campaign — the electorate of the world’s most powerful democracy will vote on November 3, less than a month from now — can’t help noticing the extent to which unapologetic ageism has crept into political jousting. According to President Donald Trump (74), his Democratic party rival […]
The tragic alleged June 14 suicide in Mumbai of Sushant Singh Rajput, a personable rising Bollywood film star, has transformed television into a media circus. A lurid latter-day tragedy of sex, suicide, murder, conspiracy, drug abuse, financial shenanigans and political intrigue is being played out in drawing rooms of rich and poor households across the […]
There’s a memory lapse within the country’s smug establishment and middle class that the national Covid-19 lockdown has ruined thousands of small-scale businesses and resulted in an estimated 18 million job losses in industry, especially in the small-scale sector which pays meagre wages to 90 percent of the country’s 420 million labour force.
Although BJP governments at the Centre and in the states have not particularly distinguished themselves for policy and project implementation, the party’s leadership deserves some credit for its commitment to big ticket structural reforms which offer a modicum of hope of extrication of the suffering citizenry from the wilderness of neta-babu socialism. Some initiatives of […]
A riveting history of the final years before the independence and partition of India titled Gandhi’s Hinduism — The Struggle Against Jinnah’s Islam (Bloomsbury 2020) which documents the rise of Mohammed Ali Jinnah (1876-1948) from an effete epicurean, agnostic barrister of the Bombay high court into the leader of India’s then 50 million-strong Muslim community […]
For beleaguered managements of English television news channels, the sustained advertising splash of the unlikely Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF) has clearly come as manna from heaven. Technically GCMMF is owned by milk producing farmers banded together into modest cooperatives. These dairy farmers are probably unaware of the very existence of English news channels. […]
A spate of newly promoted globally-benchmarked private universities are set to highlight the severe inadequacies of government colleges and universities. Promoted through specially enacted legislation of state governments (education is a concurrent subject under the Constitution) which tend to be less nitpicking and fault-finding than the mandarins of the Union HRD ministry and its handmaiden […]
The latest news that the apples of discord have divided the London-based Hinduja brothers, one of the greatest entrepreneurial families of Indian business, has aroused mixed feelings in your editor who has interacted with them off and on for over four decades. On the one hand, it’s impossible not to admire their […]
The belated decision of Hindustan Unilever Ltd (HUL), the Indian subsidiary of the London/Amsterdam-based globe-girdling household and personal care consumer products behemoth (annual revenue: $5.4 billion/Rs.38,785 crore) to drop the descriptive ‘fair’ from its best-selling Fair & Lovely (F&L) skin-lightening face cream, has come as a vindication for your editors in EducationWorld. […]
In the United States, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Sam Walton, the late Steve Jobs and even Ray Kroc (founder of McDonalds) are national heroes. They are appreciated for inventing and innovating excellent products and services for the public and generating well-paid employment for millions of Americans, and paying billions of dollars to the government as […]
The allegedly Rs. 20 lakh crore — equivalent to 10 percent of GDP — stimulus package announced on national television and radio and presented to the nation by the Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman in tranches over five days, not only plunged the Sensex by over 1,000 points but also confused if not dumfounded the […]
As noted editorially (p.10), the Union government’s underwhelming stimulus package to kickstart the economy battered by the Covid-19 induced national lockdown also offered a silver lining. While rolling out minute details of the package over five days (May 13-17), in an obiter dicta finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman also provided relief to thousands of citizens suffering […]
It’s official resurgent British Raj at The Doon School (TDS estb.1935), routinely ranked India’s #1 boys boarding school in the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings (EWISR), is over. After two expat Britons of no special distinction were successively appointed headmasters of this vintage boys boarding school promoted in pre-independence India by Calcutta […]
$2 trillion (Rs.151 lakh crore). That’s the sum that the much-maligned (and not without cause) President Donald Trump has budgeted to compensate ruined small businesses and citizens rendered unemployed in America following the national economic lockdown in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis. This staggering figure is equivalent to two-thirds of India’s […]
Iconoclastic Republic TV anchor Arnab Goswami is the man every well-mannered or aspirationally genteel middle class individual, deplores. But the meteoric rise in the viewership of this relatively new (2017) English news channel tells another story.
Ab initio Arnab Goswami transformed Republic TV’s 9 0’clock news hour into a nightly slugfest in which […]
For Rana Kapoor, former high-flying promoter-chairman of the private sector Yes Bank whose Rs.10 face value equity share was quoted at Rs.285 in its heyday and attracted public deposits of Rs.227,610 crore, the fall from grace was swift and vertiginous. It has come as a great setback for monitors of the floundering Indian economy — including your editor […]
Shoot first and investigate later. This seems to be the modus operandi of the BJP/NDA government, vaulted to power at the Centre with a landslide victory in 2014. Two years later, Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a dramatic announcement on November 8, demonetising high value currency notes. The unstated prime objective of the demonetisation initiative was to delegitimise large cash […]
EducationWorld’s first cover story of 2020 celebrated the newly-promoted Krea University (KU), peninsular India’s first American Ivy league style liberal arts varsity sited in Sri City, Andhra Pradesh, a two-hour drive from Chennai.
KU’s south Indian promoter-trustees — perhaps miffed that India’s first Ivy League model private universities (Ashoka, Jindal Global, Bennett) have sprung up […]
In mid-February four men in white linen attire walked into a liquor shop in the central business district of south Mumbai and demanded a list of documents and licences from the owner. After examining them, they highlighted several acts of omission and commission of proprietor Ashok Patel and demanded a bribe of Rs.7 lakh to […]
The unease of doing business in contemporary India is highlighted by the unfortunate experience of go-getting IIM-A alum Shantanu Prakash who spearheaded the digitisation of Indian education through Educomp Solutions Ltd (ESL), a company he promoted in 1988, and which for quite a while was the darling of the stock market when its Rs.10 paid […]
Ten years of uninterrupted British Raj in the blue-chip The Doon School, Dehradun (TDS), routinely voted India’s premier all-boys legacy boarding school in the annual EW India School Rankings, has ended. Citing “personal reasons”, Matthew Raggett, the British headmaster of TDS for the past five years, has resigned and exited India. Prior to Raggett’s appointment, […]
By any yardstick, the Republic Day (January 26) parade down Delhi’s Rajpath presided by President Ram Nath Kovind and his special guest Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, at which representative contingents of India’s 1.3 million army, navy and air force staged a march past, was a grand spectacle. The hour-long parade featuring generals, admirals and air […]
Distance lends perspective. That’s perhaps why in a cover story titled ‘Intolerant India — How Modi is Endangering the World’s Biggest Democracy’, the London-based weekly The Economist (January 23) has produced an incisive analysis detailing how the BJP, now in its second term in office at the Centre, is committing slow harakiri through a painful […]
The cuts in corporate income taxes from 30 to 22 percent and 15 percent for new manufacturing companies announced on September 20, which were enthusiastically welcomed by Niti Aayog and establishment pundits, have proved a damp squib. The expectation was that reduced tax payouts to the IT department would prompt corporate leaders, who now have more […]
The resounding slap in the face administered to Ratan Tata (RT), chairman emeritus of the Mumbai-based Tata Sons, the holding company of the multi-business salt-software Tata Group of companies (annual revenue: Rs.7.9 lakh crore) and his hand-picked Tata Sons CEO N. Chandrasekhar by the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) on December 19 could well […]
The election to the 650-strong House of Commons in Westminster, London — the mother of all parliaments — of 15 Indian-origin MPs has been widely welcomed in the domestic media as a signal triumph for India. While it is undoubtedly a great achievement for Indian emigrants whose parents were ruled and kicked about by our […]
There is something surreal about the anti-tuition and other fees agitation of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union (JNUSU) which has let loose mayhem and rioting on the streets of Delhi. It’s instructive to learn that for most study programmes of this 50-year-old postgrad varsity, its 8,500 students pay tuition fees of Rs.200-300 per year, […]
The widely reported decision of the BJP-led NDA government at the Centre to privatise Bharat Petroleum (BPCL), Shipping Corporation of India (SCI) and Container Corporation of India (CONCOR) is like a whiff of oxygen to the stagnating Indian economy in which all indicators — GDP growth rate, employment generation, aggregate demand, exports, agriculture productivity — […]
The audio-visual media and entertainment industry is experiencing severe disruption worldwide. Despite this, Barkha Dutt — once India’s answer to Oprah Winfrey — persuaded former Union HRD minister Kapil Sibal, the country’s most successful Supreme Court counsel who reportedly files an annual income tax return of Rs.50 crore-plus earned from the country’s dysfunctional legal system, […]
For most cricket aficionados of this complex game in this cricket-crazy country, the recently concluded India-South Africa three-test series which ended in a complete 3-0 rout of the visitors, was disappointing. It was almost no contest as the South Africans were thrashed by a huge margin in the first test and suffered innings defeats in […]
The sheer bad manners and exalted self-opinion babus of the Union HRD ministry entertain about themselves in spite of learning outcomes in government schools, colleges and universities across the country plumbing new lows, boggle the mind. To keep these worthies, cut-off from all reality in Indian education even as they formulate impractical policies in the […]
A follow-up of the EducationWorld India School Rankings (EWISR) 2019-20 — the world’s largest and most extensive field survey of 12,213 sample respondents (educationists, principals, teachers, fees-paying parents and senior school students) across the country — the glittering EWISR 2019-20 Awards function in Gurgaon (Delhi NCR) was a great success. It was attended by over […]
One sliver of cheering news within the pall of gloom and despondency in which the BJP government at the Centre has enveloped the high-potential Indian economy is that it has taken the overdue decision to licence companies and firms to run private trains on the 68,000 route km network of the public sector monopoly Indian […]
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