Passionate About India

When I came across the Global Gender Gap Report, published this year by the World Economic Forum, the London School of Economics and Harvard University, I was not at all surprised, as the state of women in our society is no secret. On earlier occasions, through my editorials and columns, whenever I had strongly asserted the fact that the state of a majority of common Indians with respect to social parameters like education, health and sanitation is poor, it actually meant that for the common Indian woman, the state is even more alarming. To the uninitiated, it might sound a tad exaggerated, but then numbers justify themselves. The Global Gender Gap Report, 2006, puts India at a rank of 98 out of 115 nations. It is a matter of shame that India is the only democracy of some repute (!) to secure a place so low in the report. On each and every social, economic and political account, women in India not only score much less than the Indian male, but also less than the underprivileged Sub-Sah...

On 5 March, when the Chinese Premier gave a landmark speech in the Chinese National People’s Congress, it marked the beginning of the third path-breaking era for China, the first being the 1949 Revolution led by Mao, and the second when the economic reforms started after Mao’s death. So what was special about Wen Jiabao’s speech? Well, this time the Chinese Premier assertively put across the vision of growth with equity. The vision of growth with equity is commendable, more so for China as there is no other country (forget India!) in history that has pulled as many people out of poverty in the last three decades. It is just because of this that in the last 30 years, China came from nowhere to become the epicentre of global economy. Today, it is impossible to imagine global economy without China. She has made herself completely indispensable by making almost everything affordable to the middle and lower middle class populace of the world through the gigantic production machinery of the ...

My immediate reaction, after hearing the Union Budget speech by our honourable Finance Minister (FM) was that this budget should not get more than 2 on a scale of 10. The reason? It was an extremely rare opportunity that a Finance Minister would have everything going in his favour while going to present his budget and yet it turns out to be a damp squib for every stakeholder of the economy. The fact is that Indian economy has been growing consistently by more than 8% for quite a few quarters now. The forex reserve stands at an all time high of around $188 billion, merchandise exports are on the verge of crossing the magic figure of $125 billion. Yet our FM found it difficult to garner all the courage to go ahead with a path breaking budget. Understandably the reasons for such sub-standard budget has nothing to do with the future of the economy but was intended towards the prospects of the United Progressive Alliance in the forthcoming elections. Amazingly, it miserably failed here too ...

India, for all the hype of being the second fastest growing economy of the world, with one of the largest foreign exchange reserves, still remains among the bracketed nations where having a decent home remains an elusive dream for millions. In most of the metropolitan cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bengalooru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune and even Kolkata, the price of having a decent dwelling today is beyond the reach of the common man. At times, rationale fails to justify the reasons for such an exponential price rise. The prices of apartments and stand-alone houses have shot up by 60% and 50% in Delhi and Mumbai in the last couple of years. In places like Dwarka, on the outskirts of Delhi, the price of a 900 square feet apartment in 2002-03 was around Rs 10-14 lakh. Today, the same apartment costs nothing less than Rs 60-70 lakh. By any standards, these prices are no way affordable for the teeming millions who constitute India’s middle class. As such, there is a huge shortage of houses in I...

The war on terror was never on terror. With every passing day come more revelations, humiliating and embarrassing, on how the entire concept of weapons of mass destruction was manufactured to suit US President George W. Bush’s plans to capture the Iraqi oil fields . . . and now as the US-dictated dummy government runs Iraq, and almost all oil and infrastructure building contracts are pocketed by American companies (Bush and Dick Cheney it seems had started deciding on the companies like Bechtel, Flour Daniel etc. for awarding of the contracts even before they started the war on Iraq) . . . the result is quiet evident . . . oil prices at one time all set to touch the $100 per barrel mark are now hovering around the half way mark. And Americans are happily guzzling oil in their heavy duty SUV’s . . . after the destruction of the twin towers instead of finding out the al-Qaeda terrorists, Bush started focussing on all those who, according to him, were evil including the Saddam Hussein-led...

I knew there must be more to it than meets the eye when I read media reports about the latest move by the Prime Minister to send Indian bureaucrats to American universities to improve their ‘governance skills’. Since he took office in May 2004, the honourable Prime Minister has time and again emphasised the crying and urgent need for reforms in the Indian bureaucracy. Many a time, he has used public platforms to assert that India cannot shine for its deprived and disposed citizens unless Indian bureaucrats become more transparent, efficient and accountable. He has even chanted the ‘corporate’ mantra of promoting bureaucrats solely on the basis of merit and performance. Could hapless Indians, who are forever at the mercy of the whims and fancies of Indian bureaucrats, even dream of such a thing happening in the country? I think their dreams will be dashed. The Prime Minister may be an honourable man; but the ‘system’ in India is ensuring that his noble intentions will never be translate...

What do you do when you don’t have solutions to the most pertinent problems devastating the world? Well, you just form a forum of like minded, power hungry and ayesayers, find an exotic resort in Europe and discuss the problems for a few days in the most obscenely luxurious environs and pledge to meet next year again with some new issues to discuss, albeit without any substantial solutions. This is the best way to define a forum most ceremoniously called the ‘World Economic Forum’. From which viewpoint it is a ‘world’ forum, is hard to comprehend. It can be termed a world forum if and only if the world is just about the US and Europe. And since it is not, the World Economic Forum (WEF) is in no way a global forum. So what is it? Well, to begin with, the World Economic Forum is a private entity and not essentially one, which is necessarily represented by all the nation states. Initiated by Professor Klaus M. Schwab (who has been famous for equating the anti globalisation protesters with...