The time may have come for India to stop thinking of five-year plans, and to focus instead on 10- and 20-year scenarios. Long-term scenario-building achieved a new level of popular awareness when Goldman Sachs came out with its Brics report, in 2003 &mdash; positing that India and China would become two of the three largest economies in the world in the space of roughly one generation.

T N Ninan: Think the future

Business Standard

The emerging consensus is that no agreement on climate change &mdash; at least not one with specific commitments &mdash; will be reached at next month&rsquo;s summit in Copenhagen. Environmentalists and policy-makers in many countries are dismayed and discouraged. But, in fact, now the world has an opportunity to fix the problem which has stymied successful cooperation on climate change.

Nancy Birdsall & Arvind Subramanian: Reduce verbal emissions first

North Indians travelling south of the Vindhyas experience disconnect in terms of body-language versus verbalisation. &ldquo;Yes&rdquo; in those parts is emphasised with a side-to-side shake of the head. That gesture means &ldquo;no&rdquo; in most other places. Foreigners visiting India are often equally foxed by namaskars. Putting palms together is common to many forms of prayer and not employed much as a peer-to-peer greeting outside India.

Devangshu Datta: When Obama bows right

The government has to play a bigger role in infrastructure development to improve valuations of related sectors.

Policy momentum required

No one should be surprised by US President Barrack Obama&rsquo;s genuflections to Chinese power and prosperity. For almost a year now Mr Obama has come to terms with the limits to US power and the reality of China&rsquo;s. So it is not surprising that Mr Obama allowed his visit to China to be circumscribed by Beijing&rsquo;s sensitivities and interests.

China's moment in the sun

Minister for Environment Jairam Ramesh wants India to be a deal maker at the Copenhagen Climate Conference. We propose here a deal that India can offer that addresses the objectives of the &lsquo;deal makers&rsquo; and the concerns of those who oppose any deal inconsistent with India&rsquo;s past stand. Our proposal is consistent with it and the principles of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) accepted at Rio.

Jyoti Parikh & Kirit Parikh: Deal-making at Copenhagen

Until now, Sarah Palin has been operating from the safe remove of her laptop and gotten some things done, if you count suggesting that her son Trig would be left to die by Democratic health-care proposals.

Margaret Carlson: Palin goes 'Rogue' on McCain, facts, reality

As the nation prepares to mark the first anniversary of 26/11, a gripping documentary decides to tell the tale of some of its survivors. Discovery Channel will showcase Surviving Mumbai, a documentary on the brutal attacks that India&rsquo;s financial capital faced last year. On November 26, at 8 pm, the channel will bring together candid, personal accounts from people who were caught in the terror attacks.

Surviving the nightmare

Bicycles for hire at Metro stations is a great idea &mdash; on paper.

Ride to nowhere

The recent crisis in the BJP government in Karnataka was focused on whether B S Yeddyurappa would remain as the chief minister or would the rebels get their way, or whether the BJP central leadership would succeed in affecting a compromise.

'The BJP forged a politico-business nexus in K'taka'

National Trust&rsquo;s insurance scheme and a legal guardian programme gives hope to millions for parents who worry about the future of their mentally-disabled children.

Sreelatha Menon: 2012 and after for Ammu

The Heckler and Koch sub-machine guns have finally arrived, as have the Colt grenade launchers; 200 bullet-proof vests will eventually land up, as will 19 amphibious vehicles from Canada to help patrol the seas to prevent another sea-borne attack; at some point in the future, you will have CCTVs in each street corner&hellip; The questions, however, are whether this is enough to ensure there is no other attack on Mumbai; and, are other cities in the country, say Delhi, better prepared? NDTV 24x7&rsquo;s Managing Editor Sreenivasan Jain, who spent months meeting the men in uniform, put some of this down to paper for Open magazine, and the account is as frightening as it is riveting. At one level, the story of The Untouchables, as he chooses to title his piece, is the familiar one of shortages of people and equipment. Mumbai has just 40,000 policemen to police a city of 20 million, and Jain recalls the iconic image of constable Jillu Yadav finding his .

If another 26/11 happens

Around a third of India Inc&rsquo;s investment plans are in states affected by Naxalism.

Sunil Jain: India interrupted

In an article published earlier this month (For that perfect hedge, November 7), I had argued that all plain vanilla currency derivatives should be traded on exchanges to provide price transparency and guaranteed settlements; and that complex derivatives/structured products should be traded over-the-counter only on the basis of full cash collateralisation, on daily mark-to-market basis.

A V Rajwade: Currency derivatives

It has often been argued that the acceleration in real gross domestic product (GDP) growth in the 1990s took place without a corresponding acceleration in employment growth.

Mahesh Vyas: Labour-friendly growth

My first meaningful encounter with environmental law was in a Supreme Court PIL involving use and storage of asbestos in industrial activity, specifically in relation to employee health. I recall a random remark, meant in good faith, in a preparatory meeting with the manufacturer client alluding to &ldquo;a price one paid for the benefits of industrialisation&quot;. It was not meant to be frivolous.

Global trade in some sectors unviable

The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) is reported to have proposed to the finance ministry to amend the Securities and Exchange Board of India Act, 1992 (SEBI Act) to enable senior officials of SEBI to become members of the Securities Appellate Tribunal (SAT), the special court that hears appeals against orders passed by SEBI.

Longer cool off needed for judicial role

This is the seminar time for the most topical subject, the proposed GST, as in the discussion paper presented on November 10, 2009. While the Industry and trade have reacted favourably, there are some criticisms which are unjustified. This is how they stand.

Much of the criticism against proposed GST is unwarranted

In the past week, this newspaper carried three related news reports on the business and economics of education. First, we reported that public expenditure on education in the Eleventh Plan period was falling short of the set target. This despite the fact that the prime minister dubbed the Eleventh Five Year Plan as the &ldquo;National Education Plan&rdquo;. Second, we reported the findings of the US Institute of International Education that Indian students spent as much as $2.75 billion (Rs 12,500 crore) in the US by way of tuition fees and living expenses during academic year 2008-09. Add to this what Indian students are increasingly willing to pay for education in other English-speaking countries around the world. Third, we reported the decision of the Union human resource development ministry to seek ideas from a group of Indian businessmen on ways in which for-profit private educational institutions can bridge the resources gap in higher education.

The business of education

The 27-member European Union needs more than a President to make its global presence felt. The election of Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy as President of the EU and of the EU Trade Commissioner Catherine Ashton as the EU&rsquo;s foreign policy chief does mark an important milestone in EU&rsquo;s evolution as a coherent political group, but how important will depend upon the EU&rsquo;s willingness to play its part in global affairs. For the past few months, the US, China, Russia, India and even Brazil have been grabbing more headlines in global media than the EU. Asia&rsquo;s rise and America&rsquo;s assertiveness had cast a shadow on the EU in the past few years. The global economic crisis and slowdown have, in fact, given the EU an opportunity to raise its profile once again. Germany and France, in particular, have been able to re-assert their global presence through deft political and economic management at home.

Punching below weight

In my July 2002 column and the preface to the revised and abridged version of my 1988 book, The Hindu Equilibrium, I noted the astonishing post-modern turn in Indian history, whose canonical book Imagining India by RB Inden claimed that caste was an invention of the colonial British Raj.

Deepak Lal: Caste, gene and history wars

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