Last week's uptrend looks too shaky to be sustainable, so it's best to stay cautiously optimistic

Waiting for the FM's pathajatra effect

Business Standard

Chinese manufacturing and Indian software face similar trajectories and risks

Pathways to obsolescence

The price of the Supreme Court's shutdown of mining

Never again

Slowing economic growth, a depreciating rupee, and a string of arms purchase scandals that tarnished the ministry of defence (MoD) and scuttled ongoing purchases of weaponry together made a powerful case for building rather than buying defence equipment for India's military. In the dozen years since defence production was opened to foreign direct investment (with a 26 per cent cap) and to private Indian companies, the MoD has published a series of limp policies that merely paid lip service to indigenisation. Successive Defence Procurement Procedures (DPPs) of 2002, 2005, 2006, 2008 and 2011 took baby steps when giant strides were needed, creating despondency and mistrust within the private sector.The latest procurement policy, DPP-2013, which the MoD cleared on Saturday, is a dramatic departure. The new acquisition procedure explicitly recognises that India's private sector is as Indian as the public sector behemoths. Now the Tata group, Larsen & Toubro, Bharat Forge and a multitud

Defence Ministry comes to life

Hydropower is important. But how important? Is it important enough to dry out stretches of our rivers? Or is there a way to balance energy needs with the imperative of a flowing, healthy river?

Retrain engineers, not the Ganga

Child rape cases highlight the need for safe day care as well as outreach in migrant hubs

The state as parent

"Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet" - thus, in the year 1889, wrote Kipling in his famous Ballad of East and West. Little did he know that globalisation was only less than a hundred years away.The rise of once-upon-a-time poor countries has been the central economic story of our time. More than the growth, it is the pace of the growth that tells a more fascinating story. It took Britain 150 years, after the Industrial Revolution, to double its economic output per person. The US, the emerging market of its time, took 50 years to do so in its period of fast development. When China and India began their period of high growth in recent decades, they took 12 and 16 years, respectively, to double the per capita gross domestic product (GDP). And while Britain and the US embarked on their take-off with a population of 10 million, China and India started out with a population of a billion or so each. So, in terms of force, as a McKinsey report on emerging markets

'While industrial nations need to save, emerging must spend'

China seems more willing to co-operate with India over Afghanistan, but New Delhi should step carefully

What Kabul means to Beijing

Lesson of Boston, Delhi - trust between people and police matters

The greatest weapon

The author investigates the real link between inequality, poverty and growth

The case for 'trickle-down'

Men, poor pets, throw them a bone now and then and you'll have them eating out of your hand," Samira was sharing her views with her monthly support group. It would have been easy to dismiss her prognosis if she'd been a society matron, but Samira is a senior associate and has risen in her career, she likes to boast, at the expense of the men she is so casually scornful of. "She said they have no imagination," my wife recounted later to me, on which count, at least, I begged to differ.It is my experience that what men lack by way of actual achievement, they make up in imagination. They're delusional fools who look into mirrors not to see themselves, but who they imagine themselves to be - George Clooney, Richard Gere, Hrithik Roshan, Irrfan Khanâ€¦ Where Samira might point out an insecure, vulnerable creature looking into the mirror, the men will see a reflection of invincibility, not a loser but a feisty chooser, a nobody that's actually Brad Pitt in disguise, a genius in the making. I

Man and superman

It was a dusty stone building, not unlike many that one sees in the desert. Outside, all was quiet in the heat of the day. From within, however, strains of a Colombian folk song redolent of the rain forest wafted through. I followed the music to the building. In a hall that looked like a classroom-cum-factory floor, I was greeted by the sight of five groups of women - black, white and all shades in between, sitting together in perfect harmony, assembling complicated-looking circuits. I was in Tilonia's Barefoot College, and this was my first glimpse of its 10th batch of solar engineers - all illiterate grandmothers from the poorest villages of Colombia, Nicaragua, Madagascar and Panama. They were learning how to assemble, maintain and operate solar lighting equipment; so that when they returned, they could bring light to their own communities.I watched them at work - thinking if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I might not have believed it was possible. "It's actually not that hard,"

Solar engineers, Barefoot style

The art of "smart working", a term that has gained much cachet in corporate circles, involves bending the rules and getting things done

The right wrong

Evening after sweaty evening, we become flash mobs for the 240 legal deliveries of the white ball

IPL's insouciant charm

Journeying across the country in search of livelihood, you take pleasure in the ability to integrate, assimilate. After a few years in Delhi, I thought I did quite well with my spoken Hindi, only to realise later the shopkeepers smiled not because they were impressed but because they were amused. So, in Bangalore I thought better not to murder Kannada but to get by with banking on most people having a bit of English.Although over time I have realised that linguistic divides are overrated, and it has become equally clear that festivals with strong local roots are difficult to fully embrace. The result is that in Delhi Baisakhi came and went without my noticing it overmuch and Ugadi in Bangalore was more of a holiday on the calendar than anything else.So when I approached Poila Baisakh, the Bengali new year, in Kolkata again after over a quarter century, I did it with a bit of curiosity. Will I be an outsider here too, because of unfamiliarity with current mores bred by my long absence?

Poila Baisakh is doing fine

The learnings from Boston suggest that India's police need to make a conscious effort to use social media with due care

When social media goes wrong

Assessing the greatness of a prime minister

The greatest! Who?

India can gain from joining the West in taking firm action against tax havens

Will tax havens fall apart?

Who'll buy commercial vehicles when manufacturing is frozen?

Nothing moving

Exports need free trade and reform, not old, bad schemes

No new ideas

Most MNCs do not deliver their lofty 'customer service' promises in India

Global firms, local service?

Business Standard brings you expert opinions on various issues

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