Passionate About India

While the country was engrossed in sticky issues – like that of Indians for the first time being involved in a global terror plot, or our Presidential elections, or even the daily rumbling of our polity – the Sensex quite surreptitiously surpassed the magical figure of 15,000. It was barely one and a half years back that it crossed the 10,000 mark and brought India to the league of nations with the highest market capitalization in the world. Though for any lay Indian, this milestone might not make any sense as stock markets were never a barometer for social performance of any country, the essence of this particular milestone cannot just be ruled out as a mere mindless gambling of punters. One of the most interesting facets of this meteoric rise of the Sensex is a killing dichotomy – while on one hand, India Inc. has gone about in a spectacular manner successfully tapping this boom, on the other, our ‘efficient’ government and ‘more efficient’ public sector enterprises have spectacularl...

Since the story of India’s apocalyptic growth rate and its inclusion in the coveted and prestigious BRIC Report of Goldman Sachs became a daily affair, another issue that became equally regular, is the Great Indian Rural-Urban Divide. Though ironic, there has been reality in this evolving contrast, and much of it also has been substantiated by empirical studies across the nation. It is also true that this divide has not been brought about by default, but more of a manifestation of policy designs. This “intellectually safe and morally right” issue is becoming more ‘passé’, particularly after the Planning Commission stated that poverty is on a decline in rural India and the trend is reversing in the urban areas. To understand this conundrum, one doesn’t need to have access to the most confidential governmental files. A simple walk around the A-plus category metros of the newly crowned trillion dollar economy would suffice by itself. Whether it is Dharavi of Mumbai, the Jhuggi Jhopdi colo...

The recent suicide of Capt. Megha Razdan again brings to the forth the pertinent and tragic issues of fragging, chronic depression and mass desertions, which have been marring the Indian Armed Forces since long. Even though the death of Capt. Megha Razdan is yet to be confirmed as a suicide, that there is a grave problem with the armed forces of our country cannot be ignored. In the last year itself, it has been reported that almost 100 soldiers have taken away their lives. In addition to this, another 32 have been killed by their colleagues. In fact, the spate of suicides, particularly within the Army, had been on the rise. Reports state that since 2004, of the 408 soldiers that died, around 333 killed themselves. International media too has put forth the concern that Indian Army is loosing more soldiers by the way of suicides than fighting on the borders. So what has gone so wrong that soldiers who were supposed to guard the nation against contingencies, have started pulling the trig...

The ghost of possible nuclear holocaust in South Asia simply refuses to die down. While in the last few years the chances of a nuclear catastrophe have come down considerably, time and again some or the other incidence has kept the region in perennial tenterhooks. The recent revelation that Pakistan is building a third nuclear reactor comes as a shocker and adds to the existing paranoia. Well if Pakistan puts forward the contention that it is building this nuclear reactor to mitigate the problem of power supply and to make sure that it gets an uninterrupted supply of nuclear power, even the most diehard proponent of the cause of Pakistan would find it difficult to accept. But then history is testimony to the fact that Pakistan would essentially put forward this contention only as it has always done to bring some sort of parity with India. Though it cannot be completely ruled out that Pakistan is doing this to sort of avenge the Indo-US nuclear deal as it had expected the US to give a s...

It is indeed great news when an Indian corporation achieves a billion dollar turnover, but the same news gets bigger and in itself becomes a reason for celebration if it is Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF: an apex body of 13 milk co-operatives), more popularly known as Amul – The Taste of India. Yes! The federation has crossed the coveted billion dollar mark in the current financial year, 2006-07. What makes this achievement special is that unlike any other corporation where the benefits of this kind of achievement accrue to its promoters and shareholders, in the case of GCMMF, it accrues to the most neglected and the majority stakeholder of our economy, i.e., the Indian farmer! Of course, there is more than one reason why the success of GCMMF is both unique and critical, particularly in the Indian environment. In a country where farmers have been the most neglected stakeholders, GCMMF has shown how, with the right intent and vision, a farmer cooperative can functi...

On the 2nd of October last year, when we launched The Sunday Indian with five editions in English, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil and Gujarati, we had thought that this was the best we could have pulled off and that we shouldn’t think of anything more, at least for the next two to three years! Within 6 months of the launch of Business & Economy – our first media venture – we launched 4Ps Business and Marketing; and within a year of that, we offered The Sunday Indian; and recently, the Indian PC Magazine. After five language editions of The Sunday Indian, we had to look beyond. So here we are today, launching 8 additional editions of The Sunday Indian in Urdu, Malayalam, Telugu, Assamese, Marathi, Kannad, Oriya and Punjabi, along with this special issue on the hundred most controversial Indians of the last hundred years! That makes it 13 editions in all... by far the highest number of editions for any news weekly in the country (the next highest is 6 editions of the leading news weekly of In...

At our institute, The Indian Institute of Planning & Management (IIPM), we teach that education at all levels has to necessarily translate into economic wellbeing, which then translates into economic growth, which has to further translate into pan-national economic development. If it does not, then there is something severely wrong with the said education system. Similarly, we also teach that economic growth has to necessarily translate into national wellbeing, and if it fails to, then there is something structurally wrong with the way the economy is organised. Invariably, in the classes that we conduct at IIPM, one name that surfaces as a classic metaphor for poor economic organisation is – India! Post liberalisation, barring initial hiccups, the Indian economy had been consistently sustaining annual growth rates above 5%. But unfortunately, this growth could just touch upon a very minuscule percentage of the Indian population, while the majority of the population remained complet...