Passionate About India

Honourable minister for agriculture – sir, rather than cutting the subsidies from the midday mead scheme, please arrest the existing corruption in the public distribution system! A recent report carried by a leading daily stated the inability of the government to carry on with the subsidies provision of the food grains for the ‘midday meal scheme’. As such, since the very beginning, the scheme has been inflicted by myriad avoidable roadblocks, but what the government is now planning is going to be the final nail on the coffin of the scheme. According to the report, the agricultural Ministry is contemplating supplying food grains at the so called ‘economic rate’ (Rs. 12,000 per metric tonne), which is almost double the subsidised rate (Rs. 5650 per metric tonne), effectively meaning that it would neither be a loss nor a profit making proposition for the government. For a liberalised economy, which, at the behest of the prescription of the World Bank and IMF, is trying to cut subsidies, ...

Since the time of economic liberalisation, the Indian policy makers have been suffering a strange dilemma. As we all know, economic liberalisation was never a choice – so, if on one hand, policy makers have been unwillingly advocating the principles of free market, on the other, wherever they could, they willingly stuck to their age old legacy of control. Ergo, if the private sector enjoyed semi-liberal economic policies, public enterprises got completely stifled. In fact, the biggest loser of this policy hypocrisy has been none other than government run institutions and enterprises. They have suffered relentlessly on all fronts, but suffered the most on account of neglect of the most critical resource of any successful enterprise i.e. the human resource. My argument stems from the fact that in today’s world, the success and failure of any enterprise (particularly a business one) is in its people. And the manner in which this all-important resource has been treated in any governmental ...

What happened on 9/11 is something that the world would never forget. Memories of the twin towers coming down are impossible to erase but more than that what made this event even more ‘memorable’ is the manner in which the US government has gone around hunting for terrorists in Afghanistan, and followed it up with an engagement in Iraq, thus changing the future course of global geo-politics. Similarly, 7/7 would also remain a memorable day as that brings forth the memory of the gruesome London blasts; and more than that the way the UK police had gone about chasing the perpetrators of the crime, making the incident even more unforgettable, almost giving a new definition to terrorism. What the US did to Afghanistan and then to Iraq would always remain a matter of contention globally, and has left a lot of room for criticism, but then the way the Indian government has been sleeping on terrorism over the past so many years, and allowing innocent citizens to be killed, is probably worse tha...

The US should have a special ‘Thanks giving day’ for India, looking at the manner in which premier Indian Institutions have been supplying talented manpower to them, absolutely free of cost!!! I repeat, absolutely free of cost! And from a pool of amazingly brilliant students across India! For long I have been advocating the fact that the Government of India should levy a tax from all those students of the country’s premier institutions who go overseas and join various global corporations. In fact, I’ve also been advocating that not only such students, but also the companies hiring them should pay a tax for recruiting students from premier technology and management schools of the country. And so it was good news when recently a Parliamentary Standing Committee of the HRD Ministry recommended that students from many of the premier institutes of the nation – predominantly those which run on substantial state subsidies – should be levied some sort of tax (a ‘graduate tax’ or an ‘exit tax’...

In the recent past, there hasn’t been any other issue like the issue of Indo-US nuclear deal, which has taken so much of mind space, editorial space and political (rhetoric!) space. So what is the ‘big deal’ about the deal, which has literally divided the entire nation between the ‘lefts’ and the ‘rights’, with the scales heavily tilted towards the latter? Well, without getting into the nitty gritty of the deal, the first thing that the deal does is to provide India with a seemingly attractive solution to reduce India’s problem of energy deficit and ensure energy security. Apparently, the deal ensures nuclear cooperation and trade between India and others, without compromising its weapons program. Also, that by signing the deal, India is guaranteed fuel supplies for its civilian nuclear reactors and it also retains the right to reprocess and recycle the spent fuel. On the global front, the deal helps India get recognised as a nuclear state; and geo-politically, the deal is crucial beca...

The Elementary Education in India 2005-06, a report presented by the National University of Educational Planning and Administration (NUEPA) was not surprising but has been a befitting embarrassment for the Ministry of Human Resource Development, for the report has been a blatant blueprint of the failures of this critical social indicator, sustained over years. In one of my earlier editorials, I had mentioned that creation of impediments in provisioning education to masses had been a calculative conspiracy of successive governments, for it always served their purpose. In the same lines the report reveals that there are more than 32,000 schools (i.e. 3% of all schools) in this country which do not have a single student and no wonder that half of such schools are in rural India (with Karnataka being one of the worst performers with around 8,000 schools without a single student). In addition to this a little more than 6% schools have less than 25 students! The report goes on to state that ...

Whenever it comes to issues of critical importance, our general administrators, both at the Center and the state level, have been in a state of perpetual amnesia. For India, floods are nothing new, as every year, year after year, it is around this time that nature in its fury gobbles up thousands of lives, particularly in the states of Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Orissa, West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh; yet, nothing is done about it. It is no secret that we have been the most flood affected nation after Bangladesh, accounting for almost 20% of global deaths due to floods alone. This apart, on an annual basis, more than 30 million people are displaced from their homes, on account of floods, yet our administration, year after year, stands as a mute spectator counting the number of lives lost. Instead of looking for some long term solutions, the customary aerial surveys and announcement of aid packages are made by the central ministers and the powers that be, only to be hit by the same ...