Times of India ⁽⁹²⁾

Read full article Abstract: Judging by even our modest standards, governance at the top has taken a nosedive during the United Progressive Alliance’s (UPA) rule. Some of this can perhaps be blamed on the specific actors involved. But there is a deeper structural explanation for it: the vesting of true power to govern outside the government, in the Congress high command. UPA rule has been the longest in our history that this phenomenon has played out. In all previous such episodes, either the executive successfully wrested power back from the external authority or it fell. Thus, the first time the organisational wing of the Congress seized effective power was immediately following the death of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Known as the Syndicate, the organisational wing successfully kept the heavyweight Morarji Desai at bay and installed the more amicable Lal Bahadur Shastri as prime minister. But once the victory in the 1965 India-Pakistan war had turned him into a natio-nal hero, Shastri began to assert his independence. The battle between him and the Syndicate was already brewing when he unexpectedly died in January 1966.

Read full article Abstract: An examination of the key characteristics of those contesting elections and those winning them, a subject of our current research, reveals fascinating facts about our leaders. Potentially, they can also have important implications for policies. Following a Supreme Court ruling, the Election Commission has required since 2002 that all candidates contesting election to either House of Parliament or state legislature file an affidavit open for examination by the voters. The affidavit must furnish full information on the candidate's educational qualifications, assets, liabilities, past convictions or acquittals in criminal cases and any pending charges stemming from offences punishable with imprisonment for two or more years. The information so generated offers an unusual peek into the qualifications of those governing us.

Read full article The multiple mega-corruption scandals have exposed yet again the gaping holes in our governance system. Any "fix" for this problem must include scaling back the role of the government in activities in which the private sector has the necessary competence. Among other things, this calls for bringing the privatization of public sector undertakings (PSUs) back on the policy agenda. Fiscal compulsions have yet again returned the government to minority equity sales in PSUs, but a genuine exit from production activity requires transferring the management into private hands.

Read full article Abstract: The recent electoral victory of chief minister Nitish Kumar, who successfully placed Bihar on a high-growth trajectory, and the decisive defeat of Lalu Prasad, who presented himself as the champion of the underprivileged though without supporting evidence, offer an opportunity to probe more deeply the underlying change in voter attitude. A good starting point for this investigation is the landmark parliamentary election of 2004 in which the favoured Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance suffered a surprising defeat. The press widely attributed this defeat to an "anti-incumbency" factor arising out of the "India Shining" policies of the BJP that neglected the rural poor. This explanation was inconsistent with the twin facts that rural poverty had indeed declined and there was no urban-rural divide in the voting pattern.

Read full article Abstract: India has joined the US in "China bashing", calling upon the latter to revalue its currency. According to the Financial Times (April 22, 2010), India's Reserve Bank governor spoke ahead of a meeting of finance ministers and heads of central banks of the G20 in Washington, joining with Brazil, to make a forceful case for a stronger renminbi (also called yuan). This is a mistake. For some time now, the US Congress and some Washington think tanks have aggressively sought to turn the bilateral exchange rate issue between the US and China into a multilateral issue. They have done this by asserting that the undervaluation of the Chinese currency hurts not just the US but Asia and others as well.