As you are all aware, our economy has slowed down considerably in the last two years. Growth in this financial year will be much below the average growth of eight per cent â€” that we have achieved in the last decade. Factors causing this slowdown lie both outside and within our country. The finance minister has dealt with the causal factors in some detail. I can, therefore, be brief in my remarks on this subject. It is imperative that we do everything possible to reverse this trend, and the government has made concerted and serious efforts in recent months to revive investment and growth.At the Central government level, efforts are being made to streamline the process of clearance of investment proposals, paying particular attention to clearances from the environment and forest angles as well as towards removal of infrastructural bottlenecks. However, the climate for investment is also affected by the activities of state governments. Factors like the state of law and order

'Spread of Left-wing extremism menace is slowly shrinking'

Business Standard

The visits of the French president and the British prime minister to New Delhi should be seen in the context of Europe's ebbing economic power

Harsh V Pant: When Europe's leaders come calling

When we were kids, love was a secret emotion not to be mentioned in front of everyone especially family elders. Even love for your parents and siblings was not so expressive. You loved your parents but you would not tell them. Forget about mentioning boyfriends and girlfriends, even as generic terms. If someone had a boyfriend (I studied in only girls school), you spoke about it only in hushed tones.

Nothing wrong with being in love

The Washington Consensus is still the best way to promote sustained growthTwo widely cited recent works by Robert Gordon (â€œIs US Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwindsâ€) and Tyler Cowen (The Great Stagnation) suggest that US economic growth is over, since there are few innovations in the offing and those of the last few decades â€“ based on IT, genomics and biotechnology, the third industrial revolution â€“ are less important than those at the end of the 19th and early parts of the 20th century. In terms of increased labour productivity, current innovations are unlikely to match those of the first industrial revolution of the 19th century, which was based on the steam engine and the railroad. Nor can they match the levels reached in the second industrial revolution of 1870-1900, which was  based on inventions such as electricity, indoor sanitation, the automobile, chemicals, petroleum and the airplane.Professor Gordon

Deepak Lal: Policy, not pessimism

Seventeen years after she last visited Kolkata â€“ once her home and the repository of her childhood memories â€“ my wife says sheâ€™s disoriented there now. â€œItâ€™s so dirty,â€ she complains over the phone. â€œHush,â€ warns her son, â€œif Mamata Banerjee hears that, you could be in troubleâ€ â€” which, as everyone knows, is a possibility not worth considering. Besides, isnâ€™t â€œdirtyâ€ a national identity? â€œI love Bombay,â€ my wife has been known to say, â€œbut itâ€™s so dirty.â€ Jaipur, where sheâ€™s a frequent visitor, is also dirty, of course, and Bikaner, where my parents have a home, has bins that provide banquets for the neighbourhood cows, causing litter to spill over their posh roads.Kerala is a mite cleaner, but thereâ€™s little to distinguish one city in India from another, the sameness of architecture and the prevalence of filth being universal features. Discarded plastic bags flutter like flags in the hills; in the countryside, village dumps are dis

Kishore Singh: Dirty picture, same difference

Iâ€™m always amazed by the sudden turns that my conversations with people sometimes take. One minute I was doling parenting advice to a part-time help, and the very next minute my kitchen was redolent with the vaguely questionable aroma of boiling chickpeas. Seema said her seven-year-oldâ€™s friends were refusing to play near their tenement over a drain in South Delhi. As her daughter wasnâ€™t old enough to wander around the slum, she ended up being home alone.Why didnâ€™t the friends want to come over, I asked. â€œThey say our house smells bad,â€ said Seema. I deduced it must be the salubrious location above the drain, but was proven wrong. â€œOur home always smells of chana (chickpeas) â€” either theyâ€™re soaking outside or boiling on the stove,â€ she explained.While it was true that cooking chickpeas gave off a strong odour, it also buttered the bread in Seemaâ€™s household. Her husband made a fairly good living selling chana-kulcha from his

Geetanjali Krishna: Of chanas and gas chambers

The couple that walks into the gallery has been â€œcollectingâ€ art â€” though â€œbuyingâ€ might be the appropriate term in their case â€” for some years now, unmindful of spending a lakh or two on paintings that they like. Their picks are naÃ¯ve, not yet jaded by signature scavenging, even though they are a concession to popular (er, â€œkitschâ€) taste.

A cautious optimism

Two weeks ago I wrote that anyone wanting to survive what Salman Rushdie calls Indiaâ€™sÂ â€œcultural emergencyâ€ will have to adopt the brace position â€” that is, agree to resist what has come to be seen as inevitable and not worth the trouble.Last week, the Delhi Art Gallery in Hauz Khas did just that. Displaying an exhibition called â€œThe Naked and the Nude â€” The body in Indian modern artâ€, when faced with a protest by members of the Durga Vahini â€“ foot soldiers of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad â€“ they called for police protection, and for regular art viewers to show up.The protesters turned out to be about 30 very poorly informed people. Some, on the periphery, were under the impression that the exhibition displayed photographs of the Delhi gang-rape victim. These women became very rattled when informed otherwise, and directed questioners to the loudest people closest to the police barricades. Those women said that it was shameful the way womenâ€™s bod

Mitali Saran: Tough job, but somebody's got to do it

J R D Tata (1904-1993) received his pilotâ€™s licence in February 1929, and set up Indiaâ€™s first airline, Tata Airlines, in 1932. Tata piloted its inaugural flight from Karachi to Mumbai (then known as Bombay). In 1946, it was renamed Air-India. Two years later, Tata set up Air-India International in collaboration with the government. Five years later, in keeping with the socialist fervour of the times, the government decided to nationalise the aviation business. Tata suggested that the government should consolidate the airlines into two ventures: one for domestic aviation (Indian Airlines) and the other for flying overseas (Air-India). The government asked Tata to become the chairman of Air-India. He continued to hold this post till 1978 when his services were terminated by Morarji Desai, the prime minister. In the early 1980s, Indira Gandhi, who had come back to power, reinstated Tata.Tata, it so happens, was an avid writer of letters. Some of these were published in 20

The original flight plan

Goaâ€™s transition from a mining and farm economy to a booming tourism enterprise has resulted in plenty of political jiggery-pokery at the topA European friend in search of acquiring a private rural retreat in coastal India, a maison secondaire of sorts, prospected for several years in many places including Kerala, Maharashtra and Odisha before deciding on the ideal secluded spot in Goa. His final choice was dictated by what he calls â€œthe olive oil factorâ€. This does not suggest Mediterranean hillsides covered in olive groves; simply the easy availability of provisions and produce of almost any description, a few miles away from any location.At Mapusa market, the main town in north Goa, the cornucopia of food and wine grows yearly in reverse proportion to the parking space. In addition to mounds of spices, traditional food, flowers and fresh fish, you now find neatly packed varieties of goat cheese produced locally with Swiss assistance; leeks, celer

Sunil Sethi: The olive oil factor

Penalties on suppliers doing pay-offs should be financial

T N Ninan: Let deals go through

Many Indian enterprises are entering into agreements with foreign enterprises for execution of turnkey projects in India which involve designing, manufacturing, sale or supply of the goods and

Apportioning profits in turnkey collaborations

The moment the Open Interest (OI) in the derivatives exceeds a previous high or comes in the vicinity of Rs 50,000, as in the present case, alarm bells start ringing all over the market place. 


Derivative OIs

When Archimedes screamed out aloud, â€˜Eurekaâ€™, little did he realise that he had created the â€˜aha momentâ€™, the euphoria around innovation or seeing something new coming to life for centuries ahead!Every business today aspires for the Eureka moment. Innovation has become critical for business survival and growth.In the outsourcing context, providers have traditionally looked at building and deploying solutions that alleviate the clientâ€™s business challenges without disturbing the status quo drastically. Innovation was not a clearly spelt out part of that agenda as the engagement was focused on bringing maximum value in terms of better business outcomes in the short-term.Those were the years...With the wheels of time whirring, the wheels of innovation have also moved at a rapid pace. To quote A T Kearney's 'House of Innovation' framework in the recent Nasscom Innovation Report, innovation models have typically focused on business

Innovation to drive growth in IT

The one thing that investors love to argue over is market sentiment. Your stand, of course, is determined by which side of the fence you're on. R>R>Gauging the overriding sentiment becomes all the

BS Forums: Is it a Bull Market or a Bear Market?

Banks urgently need to assume complete ownership of their business correspondent networks as well as the associated risks

S V Divvaakar: Financial inclusion stumbles on 'last-mile' gap

Most companies still treat exit interviews as a fuzzy exercise

Shyamal Majumdar: The final meeting

Sanjay Chandra of Unitech finds himself in the middle of the unending 2G scam, this time for his alleged conversation with public prosecutor A K Singh. In the tapes, Mr Singh can be heard tutoring Mr Chandra on how to counter the star witness of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), Avdesh Kumar Srivastava. The CBI had relied heavily on Mr Srivastavaâ€™s testimony. What exactly did Mr Srivastava, then deputy director general (access service) in the department of telecommunications, or DoT, tell the CBI?There was a huge rush of applications for a telecom licence (and the spectrum that came free with it) in August and September 2007. Telecom Minister A Rajaâ€™s office was taking stock of the situation every day. This information, Mr Srivastava told the CBI, was being given to R K Chandolia, Mr Rajaâ€™s personal secretary, over the telephone regularly. On the morning of September 24, 2007, Mr Chandolia asked if the applications of the Unitech group had been received. Mr S

Bhupesh Bhandari: Did Unitech really do that?

There is no reason to overreact to Chinese moves in the Indian Ocean

Premvir Das: The Chinese are coming?

Recalling loans to Kingfisher took too long

Delayed hard landing

Cyclical factors like rising interest rates and rising commodity prices should also have held back overall corporate performance. 


Cemented growth

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