Uniform national licences in telecom are overdue

Breaking the circles

Business Standard

West Bengal's commitment to reform seems doubtful

Old policies, new costs

UPA's leadership says one thing, its tax office does another

Conflicting signals

Support vs procurement

When the credit rating agency Standard & Poor's (S&P) came to New Delhi last month, the government laid out the red carpet for its analysts; senior functionaries argued persuasively that reforms were in hand and the Indian economy was on the brink of returning to a high-growth path. It appears that the government at its most persuasive has not made so much as a small dent in S&P's pessimism. On Friday the agency announced that not only was it not upgrading India's rating from BBB-, the lowest "investment-grade" rung, it was not going to change its outlook on the rating from negative, either. Indeed, S&P warned that unless India undertook major reforms in the coming year, the country would be downgraded next year. The full effects of a sovereign rating for India in junk territory could possibly be very large indeed. India is dependent, for financing its capital account deficit, on foreign institutional flows, which could dry up if India was no longer investment-grade. In

Ratings and resources

The golden goose

Govt's quest to revive defunct urea plants is hopeless

Look abroad instead

Ranbaxy needs to investigate internal wrongdoing

Recovering a reputation

Should India's telecom backbone be made in China?

The foreign spine

Lessons for RBI and banks from Cobrapost investigation

Sting in the tale

A Chinese wall between media arms and data services

Terminalgate

How Indian IT sector must counter US immigration Bill

Lobbying the Hill, softly

Lessons from ministers' delayed resignations

Two pink slips

Huge variations across sectors raise concerns about robustness

Clothes make the IIP

India needs new thinking to protect its e-frontiers

The thin cyber line

Taliban threats hang over Pakistan's historic elections

A troubled achievement

An unhealthy step

Congress should not be triumphalist about Karnataka results

Voting out misgovernance

Govt cannot brazen out Supreme Court's observations

Freeing the parrot

Cloud computing is revolutionary, but not yet fully reliable

A cloud over the cloud

How food security law is creating perverse incentives

Stoking inflation

Incisive columns and editorial comment by top opinion leaders

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