Opinions and Editorials

RBI's decision to hike CRR by 75 basis points in its monetary policy review on January 29 finally translated itself into more expensive loans for retail borrowers as a number of prominent private banks hiked the interest rates charged on home and auto loans at the end of last week.

First the good news. The committee headed by Sam Pitroda to suggest measures to put the ailing, state-owned telecom firm BSNL back on track has submitted an excellent report within record time.

For banking stocks, Budget 2010-11 was a great booster. In the last five days' trading sessions after the Budget, the 18-stocks Bankex increased 7% as compared with the 4.5% rise in the benchmark 30-share BSE Sensex.

The year 1991 was an important landmark in India's post-independent economic history. The country faced a serious economic crisis triggered mainly by an acute balance of payments problem. India's policymakers adroitly responded to the crisis by putting in place a set of policies meant for stabilisation and structured reforms.

RG Chandramogan, managing director of the Chennai-based Rs 1,000-crore Hatsun Agro Product group, has the largest private sector dairy unit in the country.

COOMI KAPOOR: Tell us about this forum on malnutrition that you are part of.
Jay Panda: This issue of combating malnutrition started three years ago with the involvement of younger members of Parliament across the political spectrum. You see four of us here but there are many others involved. Malnutrition affects one out of two Indian children.

The Delhi Municipal Corporation has not bothered to conform with its own stipulations on height and Floor Space Index (FSI) for the 112-metre and 28-storey-high new civic centre in Delhi, which is nearly complete.

If only the Bharatiya Janata Party could understand that accusations and acrimony do not a debate make, we might get the Prime Minister to explain exactly what it is he is trying to do with Pakistan.

Art has been a human right before civilisation started. The earliest cave painters at Lascaux, France, dating back 30,000 years, drew animals. The San people in South Africa drew figures of people in 27,000-year-old caves. Ancient Indian cave art 20,000 years ago in Bhimabetaka, Madhya Pradesh often showed war scenes.

The most important part of Pranab Mukherjee's Budget speech this year was his candid admission that one of the gravest challenges before India "relates to the weaknesses in government systems, structures and institutions at different levels of governance".

THE death of former British Labour leader Michael Foot at the age of 96 is a historic event in many ways.

Renowned Harvard professor, Ted Levitt coined the term 'marketing myopia'. He famously wrote that customers of drill-bits do not buy drills; what they buy is holes.

He believes that economic strength is the foundation of a country's power, but the ability to exercise power depends on the strategic assets, capabilities and technology that a country develops.

Art has been a human right before civilisation started. The earliest cave painters at Lascaux, France, dating back 30,000 years, drew animals. The San people in South Africa drew people in 27,000-year-old caves. Ancient Indian cave art 20,000 years ago in Bhimabetaka, Madhya Pradesh, had both animals and people, often fighting wars.

There was nothing un-Holbrooke-like about his utterly insensitive statement that the Kabul attack had not particularly targeted Indians.

Allow me to report a dialogue I sometimes have with myself. It goes like this. Voice in my head (VIMH): What kind of news TV would you really like to watch? Me: Just the kind I watch now, for example, Times Now, while debating Indo-Pak talks, saying Jaswant Singh and Strobe Talbott had champagne and caviar every time they met; remarkable journalism. VIMH: No, seriously.

On March 5, 2010, a division bench of the Bombay high court asked former Shiv Sena legislator Sitaram Dalvi to report on whether his party would pay compensation for acts of vandalism committed by him and other party workers.

The Budget for 2010-11 was presented precisely 10 days after the Right to Education Act was notified, for implementation from April 1, 2010. That the government took nearly six months to notify its implementation after the presidential assent in August is indicative of the backroom tussles that must have taken place regarding its funding.

A three-hour drive from Delhi a medieval drama is playing out. A khap — or caste — panchayat in Haryana's Bhiwani district has asked a man and his family to leave the village because he has married a woman of the same "gotra".

As the Academy counts down the last minutes to the Oscars, we may ponder the ideological battleground that a single film, touted as the harbinger of a new age in film technology and feared as another "popcorn" epic, has opened up since its release last December.