Beyond private vs public: The first principles

The IL&FS imbroglio will put the ideologues on both the right and left in an odd position. After a financial debacle involving public ownership, the right is quick to blame ownership as the reason

Day by day, in bits and pieces, the monumental mess that is Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services (IL&FS) is unfolding. When IL&FS first roiled the financial markets after defaulting on payment of short-term paper, some people believed that the group was only caught in a financial crunch. Its money was stuck in large infrastructure projects, while public sector banks had stopped lending, forcing it to borrow short-term. And this led to defaults. But the rot is far deeper and more dangerous. 

The first shock was that nobody even knows how many companies there are in the IL&FS group. When the independent