Opinions and Editorials

At the recently concluded TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference in Mysore, our junior foreign minister, Shashi Tharoor, spoke about how India would dominate through soft power.

Among the changes introduced by the Securities & Exchange Board of India on Monday night, the most significant is the plan to mandate half-yearly disclosure of balance sheets by the Indian corporate sector.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's speech to the World Economic Forum's India meeting was remarkable for its clarity.

It was the unlikeliest of developments to be passed off as a birthday present. The truce between Karnataka Chief Minister B.S. Yeddyurappa and the Reddy brothers was ribbon-wrapped as a show of unity, what Yeddyurappa called a "birthday gift" for the BJP's L.K. Advani, who turned 82 on Sunday.

From the stick to the carrot. Instead of making a rural stint mandatory for doctors, the health ministry has now outlined a plan to incentivise them to work in villages. It is dangling a hefty quota in postgraduate diplomas after a three-year stint in a rural area.

More than 40 years after bank nationalisation and the establishment of regional rural banks in 1975, over 120 million households in the country are outside the purview of the formal financial sector.

Any relationship between neighbouring countries is likely to be thorny in parts—there are usually issues of shared borders, resources, migration and the like.

Disinvestment has been a glowing controversy ever since we first spoke about it several years ago. It came in the form of privatisation to begin with, which raised the hackles of the left parties as anything 'private' was looked upon with suspicion. Coincidently, anything 'private' was looked at by the policymakers as being progressive.

The IMF semi-annual review is out and Oliver Blanchard, the IMF Chief Economist is quoted saying: "A decrease in China's current account surplus would help increase demand and sustain the US recovery. That would result in more US imports, which would sustain world recovery."

Alang is an Indian success story. In 1983, the first vessel was beached here for breaking. In the intervening period, business volumes have not only overtaken the Mumbai and Kolkata ports where shipbuilding used to be concentrated in India, but Alang has actually emerged as a leading shipbreaking yard in the world.

Bihar, an innovator? A trailblazer? A champion of reform? Surprisingly, all true. Bihar is looking to introduce a revolutionary new model for administering VAT, which would seek to provide a truly simple regime for small taxpayers, and a complete e-governance solution for medium and large taxpayers.

I am often besieged by queries from laymen asking me if a film is a hit or flop. When I utter 'flop' a puzzled look gets thrown back, followed by a remark that goes somewhat like this: "But I heard/read that the film grossed 50 crores worldwide so how are you calling it a flop?"

Thailand and Cambodia do squabble often. Their current spat centres around the fugitive former premier of Thailand, Thaksin Shinawatra. Cambodian PM Hun Sen has invited Thaksin — convicted for corruption charges, and living under self-imposed exile — to be his economic advisor, irking Thai nationalists.

In a moment of plain-speaking that is all-too-rare at summits of this sort, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown declared at the G-20 meeting of finance ministers this weekend that "we are only about halfway through dealing with the causes of the crisis.

It is a sign of the isolation in which the Bharatiya Janata Party's state units are beginning to perceive their political self-interest that Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan created a controversy where none need have existed.

On Friday, wholesale sugar prices in Kolhapur—one of the biggest trading centres in India—touched Rs 34.43 per kg, a jump of almost 2% in a single day.

After a deep lull, the Indian IT industry is buzzing with talk of mergers & acquisitions. The writing on the wall is clear: consolidation in the industry is good and much-needed. The pecking order of the country's top IT companies has not changed much in the last decade.

I was recently invited to give a lecture in Kolkata on whether to legalise the sale in human organs (the kidney in particular).

Of all the innovations that have shaped our lives in recent years, none has been more influential than the destruction of the Berlin Wall.

The global demand especially the Chinese demand for iron ore is having it impact on Karnataka politics.