<B>If BPO were to be stopped, workers as a whole in industrialised nations would be badly hit</B> 



The politics of business outsourcing

Business Standard

<B>A cut in duties may bring costs down and encourage competition, but it could also lead to a loss in export earnings</B> 



Should import duty on steel be reduced?

The fertiliser industry is beset by formidable problems largely because it is controlled, and the government, which alone can set things right, does too little too late. The existing pricing policies

Fertiliser impasse

The announcement by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that the states governed by it would implement the state value-added tax (or VAT) comes as both a validation of the relatively successful

VAT validated

The electronic networking of all the 290 agricultural markets in Maharashtra by the National Spot Exchange for Agricultural Produce (NSEAP) marks one more step in the on-going transformation of

Spot on

When the US announced a review of the dumping duty on shrimp imports from India and Thailand in the wake of the tsunami disaster last year, it was hoped that this ill-conceived duty would be gone for

Cold shower

The Index of Industrial Production (IIP) numbers for September 2005 were released last Friday. With this release we have the picture for the first six months of the current financial year. The data

Changing gear

Based on the 61st round of the National Sample Survey (NSS), conducted during 2004-05, 22 per cent of Indians are estimated to be poor. This translates into about 230 million people, a huge number. In

Persistent poverty

The Olympicsâ€™ counterproductive, short-sighted decision

Wrestling with confusion

Recalling loans to Kingfisher took too long

Delayed hard landing

It is not often that commodity prices, across sectors, move in a single direction for long. The current prices of most commodities, including metals, energy and many agricultural goods, have been on

Boom may last

The biggest surprise in the recently concluded assembly elections to five states is the result from West Bengal. It had been generally expected that the Left Front, in which the CPI-M is by far the

Limited surprise

When futures trading in commodities was reintroduced after a prolonged ban of over 40 years, nobody could visualise that the value of annual trade on these exchanges would leapfrog the way it has. The

More safeguards

Speaking at the annual general meeting of the Indian Banks Association, Finance Minister P Chidambaram emphasised the inevitability of consolidation amongst public sector banks in the years ahead. He

Banking on change

Readers Digest, more than 80 years old, was sold last week for $1.6 billion. In contrast, the one-and-a-half year-old YouTube was recently acquired by Google for the same amount ($1.6 billion). You

Reader's Digest-YouTube: Web valuations again!

A home-grown scale for measuring fundamentals, technicals and valuations is helpful in analysing markets like India.


A P: The FTV framework

After a hectic three-week phase of protests, fasts and litigation, the contentious issues related to the Sardar Sarovar dam's height and rehabilitation aspects are back on square one. Six years ago,

Truce, for the moment

Australia's St George Bank is planning to transfer jobs to India. 


Australia's George Bank to outsource to India

Press Trust of India

Arcelor-Mittal was pushed under the spotlight in the last few weeks for the wrong reason, when 41 people died and hundreds were injured in a deadly methane explosion in its coal mine in Kazakhstan. In

The hazards of scale

In its first five years in office, the Manmohan Singh government of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA-I) gave the country an unprecedented run of an average annual growth rate of around 9.0 per cent. In its last year in office, the economy slowed to a GDP growth rate of less than 7.0 per cent owing to the trans-Atlantic financial crisis and the consequent global economic slowdown. After that the Indian economy has not been able to cross the 9.0 per cent threshold.

The new normal?

The Union ministries of commerce and health have set themselves an identical goal of putting in place a system whereby every package of medicine (bottle, blister, vial) can be monitored under a system of tracing and tracking, preferably using two dimensional (2D) bar-coding technology.

Kill substandard drugs

Incisive columns and editorial comment by top opinion leaders

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