All the BRICS &ndash; Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa &ndash; seen as &ldquo;shining&rdquo; are currently in actual or incipient trouble. I had discussed China&rsquo;s case in my previous column (&ldquo;China&rsquo;s hubris&rdquo;, June 18). Brazil&rsquo;s so-called social democratic &ldquo;Brasilia consensus&rdquo; is now being aped by many other Latin American countries not seduced by Hugo Ch&aacute;vez. Its basis is the macroeconomic stability introduced by Henrique Cardoso, combined with Lula&rsquo;s adoption of the Mexican Progresa programme of conditional cash payments to the poor, financed by the commodity price boom. The resultant rise in consumer credit, shortage of domestic savings &ndash; with investment increasingly financed by foreign investment leading to a growing current account deficit and currency appreciation &ndash; and an expansion of the vast and inefficient public sector have led to overheating and a rise in inflation.

Deepak Lal: Shrink the state

Business Standard

Human beings are creatures of habit. Like other politically unaffiliated people of my generation, I think of renamed cities by their old names. Since that is not the house style, I shall not refer to the Western metropolis by any name at all.

Devangshu Datta: Time for a security check

Cities with a history and a personality have a distinctive rhythm of their own. What may ordinarily seem earth shaking often creates nothing more than a ripple. As in the immortal song Ol&rsquo; Man River, the city &ldquo;jes&rsquo; keeps rollin&rsquo; along&rdquo;. As I prepared for one of my periodic stays in Kolkata I got ready to see a new avatar of it, not a transformed entity maybe but at least noticeably different &mdash; the way people note that your walk differently, a bit jauntily, after you have landed a much sought-after job.

Subir Roy: It just keeps rolling along, for now

Watching Jeremy Browne, Britain&rsquo;s strapping young junior minister for foreign and Commonwealth affairs, kick four footballs and autograph each in a Kolkata slum, I wondered if the British Council&rsquo;s true purpose in organising the event was to rehabilitate wayward youth or reform errant policemen. Neither perhaps. Perhaps Goalz, the project partnered by Kolkata police, the municipal corporation and six football clubs, is intended to teach Trinamool Congress politicians punctuality and politeness.

Sunanda K Datta-Ray: Foot in the goalmouth

The Indian manufacturing sector has had to run very fast in order to stand still in this millennium. Despite an exceptional performance in the first decade, its share in the overall gross domestic product (GDP) has remained between 15 and 16 per cent.

Renu Kohli: From treadmill to fast track

The Reserve Bank of India governor has expressed the urgent need for better official data on which to base policy, and pointed out the dangers of basing policy on incorrect or unstable data, but the ministry of statistics and programme implementation has been given to someone who reportedly doesn&rsquo;t want this unimportant job. Yet this function does need far more energy and participation from a wider set of players, particularly when the country is going through rapid change that is so unstructured.

Rama Bijapurkar: Needed - New data bases ASAP

I remember the first time I saw Mirik. A small town amidst tea gardens near Darjeeling, it was really picturesque. &ldquo;People who live here are so lucky,&rdquo; my son said in awe as we strolled past Mirik&rsquo;s lake and saw mountains of freshly-harvested oranges on the side of the road, waiting to be transported to larger markets. But we were on holiday. People who lived there had another story to tell. Though Mirik had several schools and a degree college, the general consensus among students there seemed to be that the future lay in studying in Siliguri, Kolkata or Delhi. Almost every family there had a member or two who&rsquo;d migrated to bigger towns and cities for better opportunities. &ldquo;My family would have been very badly off if my father hadn&rsquo;t got a government job under the OBC quota,&rdquo; said our driver Raj Gurung.

Geetanjali Krishna: The merit of quotas

Darling,&rdquo; I said to my wife, &ldquo;when you are in London, I hope you will not visit He Who Must Not Be Named.&rdquo; &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t be silly, sweetheart,&rdquo; my wife responded, &ldquo;you know I hate seeing movies alone.&rdquo; &ldquo;No, no,&rdquo; I admonished her, &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t mind you watching the Harry Potter film, or chumming up with Lord Voldermort, or even Ralph Fiennes for that matter, but you mustn&rsquo;t see, er, You Know Who.&rdquo; &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know why you&rsquo;re talking in riddles,&rdquo; my wife snapped back, &ldquo;but if you don&rsquo;t want me to meet your best friend from college who is no longer your friend at all, then I shan&rsquo;t.

Kishore Singh: Nomad with baggage

From amidst the heat and dust generated after the Wednesday bomb blasts, the lone voice that made any sense was that of Julio Ribeiro.

Listen to Julio

It&rsquo;s interesting what bits of one&rsquo;s education one remembers. I spent one long, hot afternoon in junior school memorising the Sanskrit chant Bhaja Govindam. This tedious task was much eased by terror &mdash; because the lesson was with a teacher who, though entertaining, was also uncompromising. Each of us was to stand up and chant the whole selection (about 40 lines), in front of the class. As luck would have it the teacher called on me first, and &mdash; relief! &mdash; it all tumbled out more or less perfect.

English as she is spoke

The aloo wars of 2005 are now barely remembered, but for a brief while, the question of whether Indian potatoes were infected or not became a cross-border issue.

It's eating us

It is no exaggeration to say the media represents the sector of the economy that is the envy of others because of the extremely buoyant growth rates witnessed over the last two decades, in an environment characterised by minimal or no regulation. The sole statutory, quasi-judicial body set up for media regulation is the Press Council of India (PCI). While it aims to preserve the freedom of the press and improve its standards, it has no way of imposing punishments for any violation. In the absence of any other government regulator, the focus has shifted to self-regulation by the media organisations, individually or collectively. Collective self-regulation has failed because it is neither universal nor enforceable. Individual self-regulation has also failed due to the prevailing of personal interest over public interest.

'Editors are giving way to marketing'

A recent study by the National Council of Applied Economic Research found bribery rampant in Panchayats, with households being forced to pay extra to access their entitlements.

Sreelatha Menon: Panch Parmeshwar

No one still quite knows the final value of the gold, silver, jewelry and other valuable offerings locked up in the vaults of the Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple in Thiruvananthapuram. One estimate puts the value of whatever has been accessed so far at Rs five trillion. The government and the courts have quite correctly focused first on the safety and security of the discovered treasure. Nothing is more important right now than the assurance of foolproof security systems and total transparency in the organisational methods being employed to ensure proper accounting of the material found. Avoidable controversy can needlessly cast a shadow on what is very clearly a great discovery, an exhilarating find and a historic moment for the great temple, from whose deity the city in which it is housed derives its name. Historians believe that these treasures and offerings to the almighty might have been collected and placed in these vaults by the great Maharaja, Marthanda Varma.

In God we trust

There is an urgent need to make the Lokayukta&rsquo;s recommendations binding in nature and not merely advisory, through provisions for concrete punitive action in cases of non-compliance.

Nripendra Misra & Tannu Singh: A case for effective state Lokayuktas

This is with reference to T N Ninan&rsquo;s column, &lsquo;Do a garage sale&rsquo; (Business Standard, 11 June, 2011). I agree with some aspects of Mr Ninan&rsquo;s piece. There is no case in the present economic context for the government to be in tyres, shoes, paper, newsprint, bicycles, scooters or watches, which form the bulk of the quarter of the 48 PSEs under the department of heavy industries (DHI) that have ceased operations or are closed.

Ashok Parthasarathi: Sick state  enterprises - To sell or revive?

Going against the trend can be dangerous in a bear market.

Some smart trading moves

Next week the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) will come forward with its quarterly review of the economy and of monetary policy. In less than two months, the tenure of the incumbent RBI governor, Duvvuri Subbarao, comes to an end. Those who have built India&rsquo;s great institutions have believed for a long time that decisions pertaining to appointment to high offices should always be taken several months ahead of the actual appointment.

Double mint

In my years of practice, I have not come across a judgment which has such a great opening gambit, as does the Supreme Court with Deep Throats&rsquo; famous line &ldquo;follow the money&rdquo;. The ruling is a scathing indictment of the inadequacies of our systems. The genesis lies in the Hassan Ali Case - the Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed by Ram Jethmalani in 2009, invoking Article 32 read with Article 14 - right to proper governance, alleging that certain high worth individuals were stashing away large sums of money generated in India in various foreign banks, particularly in tax havens and jurisdictions with strong secrecy laws. Allegations were made against political leaders and governmental agencies for lack of vigilance and dereliction of duty in cross border movement of monies.

Follow the money

Better late than never. Australia, the world&rsquo;s biggest per capita polluter, and yet a hesitant signatory to the Kyoto protocol on climate change, has now mooted a domestic carbon pricing regime that can put the country on the track to clean development.

New climate in Australia

The nation seems to be under siege. By a medley of forces, the scale and complexity of which only seem to expand by a new dimension every day. This is not just about &ldquo;civil society&rdquo; having a desire to govern the nation. It is equally about courts being desirous of running government.

Institutional decay terrorises investment

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