Yell SCAM at 115 decibels

Something as obscure as fixing the price of natural gas for drillers can become a hot and loaded debate in India - proof that doing anything, anything at all,  in this country has become so difficult . This is a slightly old story, but draws some important lessons. Firstly the story itself. In March the government raised ( or tried to raise) the price of natural gas it pays to domestic drillers...

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No emails after 6 PM please; we are French

If ever there was  a misleading post title - this is one. But I am feeling mischievous, and since when has journalistic puritanism been required in a blog ! So read on. You may have caught the "news item" with exaggerated headlines which seemed to imply that the French had banned reading emails after 6 PM. The trouble was that they did no such thing.  What they did was a collective bargaining...

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The awfulness of PC

No; not P.Chidambaram , the outgoing Finance Minister of India. The PC I refer to is Political Correctness. I have a healthy disdain for politically correct expressions, usually the pet infatuation of the Left.  But what happened in Mozilla, the company which puts out the Firefox browser, is nothing short of outrageous. What happened was this. Brendon Eich was appointed CEO of Mozilla. Within...

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How to sell all this to the electorate

Maybe I should amend the title to "Can all this be sold to the electorate" ?  Well, I am not sure whether this can or cannot be sold (admittedly a difficult task), but I strongly believe it SHOULD be. In a democracy, we elect the form of government we want. However imperfect, it is better , in the long run, than any other alternative. But a sensible democracy is only possible when presented...

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Get the poor to subsidise the poor

I am not sure what the Tamil Nadu government is. A bootlegger ? A bottomless pit ? A great implementer ? A humane  carer of the unfortunate ? A bunch of eunuchs in the court of a megalomaniac ? All of the above ? Read on. I was tempted to take a one post detour from the economic manifesto for the country as a whole, to shine a spotlight on Tamil Nadu. This was prompted by a comment from myfloatingthoughts...

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The virus of corruption

In the previous posts developing the economic manifesto, we had parked the issue of corruption to be discussed separately. We now address the tackling of corruption, arguably one of India's biggest problems and one which is indisputably linked with any economic road map. My first submission is that corruption can never be totally eliminated - for it stems from one of the basic human  vices...

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Lock the checkbook

After considering the revenue side in the previous post, let us turn our attention to expenditure. This is important, as the pattern of expenditure reflects our priorities and the debate really ought to be on whether the priorities are right or should there be a different set of priorities. Even if you disagree on my classification of "productive" and "non productive" expenditure when I outlined...

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