Opinions and Editorials

The Rs 86,000-crore Indian FMCG industry is on a roll. Compared to other corporate sectors in India, the FMCG industry has performed well in Q2 FY10.While many Indian corporates have reported heavy losses, major FMCG companies have posted a double digit growth in Q2 FY10. As a result, the industry has registered a 12% volume growth in Q2 despite the economic downturn and poor monsoon.

Minister Kamal Nath is a go-getter. He has been putting much-needed energies into the road transport and highways sector, which fell into an unforgivable rut over the past few years. At a recent interaction—the Idea Exchange—with The Express Group journalists, he said he would build more roads in a year than were built over five years of the NDA's tenure.

Much as one would like to give kudos to Reserve Bank of India for quietly putting the focus back on liberalisation of the financial sector in its recent review of the monetary policy, its stoic silence on how to grow credit when India's growth pattern is still wavy and fragile is regretful.

The central bank's clear signal that it intends to tighten monetary policy is already showing on bank credit off-take.

Imagine opening a website, keying in a few search terms and presto! You are on the page of a rival website. Users may not mind such an occurrence, but the website in question surely will. That's exactly what happened recently when Consim India, owners of bharatmatrimony.com and indiaproperties.com, petitioned the Madras High Court against Google.com for "infringing on its trademark.

In the multi-storeyed complex in the government colony I lived in during the late '70s, I would follow friends of mine in chanting a taunting poem to a sardarji on the ground floor.

It will be 12 days on Tuesday since the Congress-NCP alliance in Maharashtra scored a surprisingly easy victory in the assembly elections and were assured of a third straight term in power.

Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram has asked the CPI (Maoists) to "halt" armed operations and to come to talks.

What a difference twenty-five years makes. A quarter of a century ago, the television screen (black and white) was frozen in time. For three days, Doordarshan, the sole channel then, remained stationed at Teen Murti Bhavan where Indira Gandhi's body lay in state. The shehnai mourned in the background, while dignitaries and the public filed past.

She is helping American undergrads analyse English poetry, critique literary essays and write book reviews.

If Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit to Jammu and Kashmir was a fresh sentence in a changing conversation, here's something that renders one speechless: the Union home ministry has banned pre-paid cell-phone connections in the state.

An article of stray, unconnected thoughts:
• President Obama has been awarded the Nobel Prize not for what he has achieved but for what it is hoped he will achieve. His election has ended Bush's imperial presidency and this has engendered the hope that America will once again work within the framework of multilateralism based on respect for national sovereignty.

Last year when Haile Gebrselassie opted out of the marathon at the Beijing Olympics, it was not part of the general hysteria that had preceded the Games about the city's air quality, anxiety that soon enough evaporated in a run of blue-sky days.

If there is one sector that is visibly the intersection of backroom politics, crony capitalism and serious threats to India's internal security, it is mining.

The world of sports beyond cricket is evolving rapidly. But the glitz and marketing that sports such as hockey, basketball, soccer, tennis, and now boxing require for them to compete at some level with cricket, is absolutely crucial.

Two new corruption cases from Jharkhand exemplify how India's mineral riches are being mishandled even as their demand—both global and domestic—is booming.

President Obama has been awarded the Nobel Prize not for what he has achieved, but for what it is hoped he will achieve.

After a gap of almost two years, India has again started importing foodgrains and this time it is rice, the trigger for which came from the worst monsoon in decades that pulled down paddy acreage by almost 60 lakh hectares and could bring down the total rice output by 10 million tonne to 15 million tonne.

Almost all economic indicators from everywhere in the world suggest that we have exited the worst period of the crisis that began with the collapse of Lehman in 2008.