Its past sins visit its present predicaments? The Stalinist cult of “collectivised” agriculture, call it by what name you like, that had entrenched the idlers in the vilages, panchayats and land holding patterns! Who said agriculture is not important? But the CPM in W.Bengal always touted its land reforms as the end of all socio-economic…
Pull up the PSU banks priorities!
Govt. must ban PSU bank ads with the PM/FM letters and photos! Farm debt write-offs should be followed by sustained farm credit systems. A PSU bank celebrating 100 years or some such events using the PM/FM letters and photos on full pages in all national dailies must have costed the bank several lakhs of rupees!…
The much-talked about Cabinet reshuffle
Much ado about nothing? Unchanging ground level realities! Economic growth is not just a rate of growth of some dry statistics. Not what P.Chidambaram or Ahluwalia or even by the PM’s own exposition itself! Economic growth is peoples’ growth; that is what the nation-builders told us. Prime Minister Dr.Manmohan Singh seems to have become more…
Going about the development debate!
Is Rural India losing out? Urbanisation, creation of new suburban cities, future of the villages! Readers of this column must have had the feeling that we are dumping down our own individual views on what constitutes the genuine rural development vision. We don’t have any ideological individual view or vision as such. Rather our view…
Inflation: is it economics or politics?
High Inflation comes to haunt the Government! Coalition politics to populist policies lead to inefficient economic management? To borrow a historic phrase from Karl Marx, “the spectre “of inflation is assuming serious dimensions! There is an intriguing silence at the top. Everyone is clearly worried and we assume there is desperate action, though behind the…
Moily’s Utopia? Or, a set of impossible recommendations?
Mr.Veerappa Moily, the former Chief Minister of Karnataka and now a senior Congress leader and trouble shooter for the PM and Sonia Gandhi(he is in charge of the Tamil Nadu Congress affairs) has headed a second administrative reforms panel and now submitted its proposals to the government. From what we have seen from newspaper reports…
Punjab and Gujarat
Rich states, rich politicians! Poor track records, negative images! The NDTV show on the Punjab farmer’s suicides came as a rude shock! The heart-breaking scenes, the tears and misery of the women who lost their husbands were too much to bear viewing for long. Yet, the feature did a great national service for highlighting what…
And now, Russia!
How many Indians know of Russian society and politics as it has become lately? Russia evokes a confused image today. For most Indians of this generation the present Russian society and politics might not mean much. The image of Russia we have is one of the recent past that is the Soviet Russia of the…