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| 'Outlays have had no relationship with outcomes' | 15-NOV-09 |
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| As an Indian, and one who has held high ministerial office, it is only right that I begin by portraying the reality of my own country before drawing comparisons with my South Asian neighbours. The World Food Programme tells us that half the world’s hungry live in India. |
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| India will be the next country off the block: Montek | 09-NOV-09 |
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| Reasserting the fact that India could easily attain a growth rate of above 7 per cent in the next financial year, Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia today said India was not extensively dependent on the global economic recovery for its own growth projections. |
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| Bottoming out | 06-NOV-09 |
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| The trade numbers for September 2009, released earlier this week by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, broadly conform to the trends that are visible in the global economy. The year 2008-09 was a sharply differentiated year for exports. From April-September 2008, exports grew by over 20 per cent year-on-year. By sharp contrast, they dropped by over 20 per cent year-on-year during the October 2008-March 2009 period. Given the state of the global economy in the first half of 2009-10, the high base of the previous year would have been expected to result in rather sharp declines during the current year, and so it was. During April-September 2009, exports declined by almost 30 per cent in dollar terms. However, tracking the turnaround in major destination economies, the rate of decline has been gradually easing off. It fell below 20 per cent last in August and has come in at 13.8 per cent in September. |
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| Plan panel pitches for aggressive disinvestment | 04-NOV-09 |
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| The Planning Commission today pitched for "aggressive" disinvestment, and said the proceeds from sale of government shares in public sector undertakings should be utilised for new investment projects. |
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| Montek expects 6.5% growth | 04-NOV-09 |
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| The Planning Commission expects the economy to grow by 6.5 per cent during the current fiscal, and inflation of food articles to moderate in the coming months with the arrival of rabi crops. |
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| Sanjaya Baru: Time to get our fiscal act together | 04-NOV-09 |
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| Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee’s assurance in New Delhi on Tuesday that India must return to the path of fiscal prudence was timely. Last week he had fiscal conservatives worried with his remark that he would tell his G-20 counterparts this weekend that every country must have its own timetable for the withdrawal of fiscal stimulus and that there can be no one-size-fits-all formula. |
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| Slowdown hits Plan resources | 04-NOV-09 |
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| As the Eleventh Five-Year Plan period (2007-12) reaches halfway stage, the government is likely to face substantial financial shortfalls in the next two years, resulting in a marginal decline in the originally envisaged cumulative gross budgetary support (GBS) of Rs 1.6 lakh crore. |
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| Experience the pain | 03-NOV-09 |
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| Air India flights to the newly-built Bangalore airport usually land on the third runway. Recently, however, a flight carrying Planning Commission Deputy Chairperson Montek Singh Ahluwalia, a media baron and a host of other VIPs landed on the first runway which is close to the airport’s terminal building. While many were happy, a Congress general secretary and Rajya Sabha MP told co-passengers, “The flight should have landed on its usual runway. Then Ahluwalia, who is closely associated with the process of making greenfield airports in this country, would have understood the plight of passengers — the flight takes almost 20 minutes after landing to reach the terminal building. |
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| Bridging the skill gap | 26-OCT-09 |
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| The recent controversy over the nature of visas issued to Chinese workers working on projects in India should not be viewed as just another source of tension between India and the Middle Kingdom. It also reflects a rank failure on the part of the Indian government to develop a sufficient skill-base among India’s own blue-collar workforce. The fact that Indian companies, including government-owned ones, are compelled to import blue-collar labour that is skilled enough to handle high-tech tasks required in, say, metro rail construction and telecom projects is testimony to this. In that context, the inauguration of the National Skills Development Corporation (NSDC) earlier last week could be viewed as a positive development. |
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