By most accounts, the Beijing Olympics have been a huge success as a worldwide spectacle.

Editorial: China after the Olympics

Business Standard

The proximate reason for the hike in petroleum product prices last month was the likelihood of shortages in these products, as cash-strapped oil firms ran out of money to import crude.

Editorial: Bottom of the barrel

Wind back to the seventies and the eighties.

Editorial: Art for money&#39;s sake

A country that has had to press the pause button when it comes to celebrating its economic successes, is now face to face with hard political and social questions.

Editorial: A time for cold realism

By making a friendly takeover bid for the UK-based Axon, Infosys Technologies has at last done what it has been expected to do for years, make a substantial acquisition which will deploy a part of its

Editorial: Infosys acts at last

Notwithstanding the relief provided by the recent decline in oil prices, the global economy is hardly out of the woods yet.

Editorial: A long, slow grind

Floods, often deemed mistakenly as natural disasters, are the result mostly of human misadventure in the river catchments, and the neglect of water systems.

Editorial: Not a &#39;natural&#39; disaster

The World Bank recently published the results of a research project on global poverty.

Editorial: Over-estimating poverty?

If the country&rsquo;s Left leaders believed in astrology they would probably be trooping to some of its practitioners right now to do something about their phase of bad luck.

Editorial: Inner-party contradictions

In the past few weeks, there have been two high-profile cases where blatant attempts to use bribes to obstruct justice have come to light.

Editorial: Slap on the wrist

P>Y Venugopal Reddy&#39;s five-year term as the governor of the Reserve Bank ends in two months.

Editorial: For monetary stability

P>An extraordinary thing has happened in Pakistan: the government is fighting to retain control of Peshawar even as the jihadis tighten their ring of control around this town of 3 million people in the sensitive Pashtun belt, overlooking the Khyber pass.

Editorial: Who's fighting whom?

P>Over the last few years, the economy has been awash in foreign exchange, completely shifting the focus of the debate on the balance of payments (BoP), from managing scarcity to dealing with abundance.

Editorial: Back to old concerns

P>The much-awaited national action plan on climate change, unveiled by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh ahead of his departure for Japan to attend the G-8 summit as a special invitee, was patently timed to serve as a bargaining tool at the global level but, aside from that, is designed to serve a domestic agenda.

Editorial: Many good intentions

<P>Clearly, the RSS/BJP is bracing itself to unleash a fresh offensive of communal polarisation in the run-up to the forthcoming general elections, hoping that these would come earlier than schedule.

`UPA govt has provided grist to the BJP's mill`

P>The Provident Fund Board has recommended a dramatic increase in the number of workers covered under the Provident Fund scheme.

Editorial: Expand, but also improve

P>Record procurement of wheat by the Food Corporation of India (FCI) and its allied agencies may have dispelled the spectre of food insecurity by replenishing depleted official food reserves, but that does not necessarily guarantee grain availability at reasonable prices.

Editorial: Creating a wheat scarcity

P>T he attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul, with the terrible toll that it has extracted, raises the ante when it comes to India&#39;s presence in Afghanistan.

Editorial: A new front

&nbsp;It is now clear that there will be no quick respite from high oil prices. That in turn means the country's trade deficit will balloon; in April-May, the deficit was 50 per cent higher than a year earlier, and running at $10 billion a month.

Editorial: No free lunches

P>It does not come as a surprise that ICICI Bank has slashed the performance bonus for its senior management for the last financial year.

Editorial: Not bonus time

P>Now that the Left parties are out of the government equation, the optimists expect Manmohan Singh to unleash a volley of reforms.

Editorial: Hoping for reforms

Incisive columns and editorial comment by top opinion leaders

Page 596 - Editorial Comment