Opinions and Editorials

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

RBI has now made it amply clear that it is more worried about inflation than growth in the months ahead.

India's economic growth is contingent upon the growth of the Indian steel industry. The per capita consumption of steel in India, around 46 kg, is well below the world average of 150 kg and the developed country average of 400 kg. It is important that the steel industry in India is prepared to meet the growing demand, projected to rise to 200 million tonne by 2015.

Last week, memory lane in India got snarled up by appraisals of the former Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, on the 25th anniversary of her assassination.

Compared with almost any other industry in India, banking is ridden with anti-competitive policy. It is essentially impossible to start a new bank, foreign banks are prohibited from competing in India, and existing banks have to take permissions to open branches.

Capitalism is evil. That's the central message of Michael Moore's latest documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story, now showing in the US. It is evil because it is a source of injustice and because it corrupts politics to further its ends.

If any evidence was ever needed to substantiate the claim that we are still at a very nascent stage of recovery, one needn't go any further than examining the latest core sector data.

The automobile industry in India will likely show a new high when the numbers for October are released for public consumption.

If you are young and are burning with an idea for a new business, think again. If you don't come from a business family, not endowed with family wealth, or lack political backing, it is a near impossible preposition to set up a new business in our country.

The most striking move by Indira Gandhi, before the declaration of the emergency, was a mid-night ordinance in July 1969. At one stroke, the ordinance gave the government control over a big chunk of the savings of the Indian people.

The government's one-size-fits-all panacea to ensuring quality in educational institutions has been "control".

The numbers tell us the United States is out of recession. According to the US commerce department, America's GDP grew at an annualised rate of 3.5 per cent in this year's third quarter, following four straight quarters in which it shrank. But it may be too soon to beat the drums and bang the gongs of celebration. There are some questions to be asked first.

It goes well beyond the occasional confessional outburst. Written in the pages of his memoir Andre Agassi has done the nasty by revealing a shocking secret that he guarded for so long. That Agassi, the golden boy of tennis, an eight-time Grand Slam champion, lied about substance abuse in order to escape a ban has come as a shock to most.