In The Media ⁽⁴⁰⁰⁾

Ten years ago, only three in hundred Indians had a phone. That number's up to 45 now. The next step is going from plain communications to applications. Read full article The spread of mobile telephones across the breadth and length of the nation is without doubt the biggest success story of the Indian economic reforms. No single event since Independence has transformed the lives of Indians as mobile phones have. Remarkably, the transformation has come about almost entirely within the last decade. Just 10 years ago, the total number of mobile and fixed-line phones was less than three per 100 individuals. Mobile phones had been introduced in the mid-1990s and accounted for barely 6 per cent of all telephones. Today, the number of phones per 100 individuals has risen to an impressive 45. Much of this growth has been in mobile phones, which now account for a staggering 92 per cent of all phones. Fixed-line phones are now an endangered species. While the growth in phones has been concentrated in cities, rural areas have been fast catching up. There are…

Specious ideas about climate change are occupying public policy space.Read full articleAbstract:According to Gresham’s Law, bad money drives out good. In debate on complex policy issues, ideas sometimes suffer the same fate as money. The debate on climate change offers a good example. Many specious ideas have come to occupy public policy space. These must be exposed and clarity restored, as done below. Idea 1 Meaningful mitigation is not possible without China and India accepting mitigation obligations. The US Congress has adopted this position and many commentators based in Europe and the US embrace it. Two arguments are offered in its support. First, China and India are such large emitters that without their participation, mitigation effort will fall short of the necessary. Second, unless these countries accept emission caps, developed-country carbon-intensive industries will simply migrate to them with no net reductions in emissions. The fallacy in the first argument is that India is a small emitter and not in the same league as China. Whereas the latter accounts for 21% of global emissions, India’s share is only 4%. In per-capita…

Read full article Abstract: Jaswant Singh has done a great service by sensitising us to the importance of a better understanding of India's immediate pre-independence history. His book, and the controversy that surrounded it recently, have led me to undertake a closer scrutiny of this critical period. I have, in turn, reached the conclusion that the key question on which the media has been transfixed who is culpable for the partition is essentially moot. The objectives, philosophies and backgrounds of Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohammed Ali Jinnah and of the Congress and Muslim League were so fundamentally in conflict that the partition was inevitable.

Read full articleThe HRD minister needs to divert his political capital to tackling the reform of college and university education.When the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) II announced Kapil Sibal as its human resource development (HRD) minister, the advocates of higher education reform were delighted. Two of his predecessors - Murli Manohar Joshi and Arjun Singh - had been stubbornly opposed to all reforms. The higher education system in India could not afford yet one more anti-reform HRD minister.Under the guiding hand of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, his reformist finance minister Yashwant Sinha had worked to implement economic reforms in virtually all sectors of the economy. But when it came to higher education, the dynamic duo could not budge the wall that was Joshi. The sector met the same fate under Arjun Singh during the UPA-I rule.

The global financial crisis is a year old this month. Here is why the crisis went so deep and why it spread so quickly and so widely. Read full article In the 1980s and early 1990, the United States had witnessed another crisis that saw 750 savings and loan associations (S&Ls) fail. S&Ls had specialised in accepting savings deposits and making residential mortgage loans. Deregulation in the 1980s allowed them to lend to increasingly risky borrowers who defaulted once the housing boom ended. The crisis remained confined to the S&Ls, however, with government successfully rescuing the depositors for just $125 billion in public money. In contrast, the current crisis engulfed the entire globe largely because the proliferation of financial derivatives comprising the so-called "shadow financial economy" indirectly placed the risky mortgages on the balance sheets of financial institutions around the world. Defaults in the housing market impacted all holding these derivatives.