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Given the strong language used by the Chief Justice of India Rajendra Mal Lodha in his August 25 judgment on the coal blocks allotment scandal, popularly called Coalgate, few will be surprised if many of the 218 blocks allotted in an illegal manner are soon cancelled. Whereas this may cause a temporary disruption in the working of critical infrastructure sectors of the Indian economy, it will also send out a powerful signal to politicians and their cronies from the world of business that the...

It is sometimes said that not even God can predict the price of oil. As a humble mortal, that too a practising atheist, one must confess at the outset that the dip in the international prices of crude oil has taken me and many others completely by surprise. Iraq is in a turmoil, almost on the verge of imploding. The situation is similar in Syria except that the civil war in that country has been going on for more than three years. Gaza is burning. The political crisis in Libya shows no signs of...

In the second decade of the 15th century, after the French ruler Charles VI was succeeded by his son bearing his name, a phrase was coined: "The king is dead, long live the king". The phrase literally meant that the transfer of sovereignty occurs simultaneously from the moment of death of an earlier monarch. Over the years, the phrase came to signify superficial change: the more things change, the more they remain the same. On 15 August, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that he had decided...

Here's a classic case of how the attachment of proceeds of crime can be delayed and how attempts by revenue authorities to recover laundered money can be frustrated. Here's a story about the working of the judiciary and corporate India. What follows is a tale about a once-notorious company, Satyam Computers, now in a respectable new avatar, Tech Mahindra. The company has so far succeeded in ensuring that a not-exactly-piffling amount of Rs 822 crore (Rs 8.22 billion) -- described as proceeds of...

The more things change, the more they remain the same. The hypocrisy of the two largest political parties in the country, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Indian National Congress, stand thoroughly exposed because of the manner in which their representatives have been wrangling over the issue of increasing the cap on foreign investment in Indian insurance companies from 26 per cent at present to 49 per cent. At one level, representatives of the two political parties are indulging in...

Besides controlling food inflation, the most challenging task before Narendra Modi is to create jobs for millions of young men and women, some of whom were responsible for his resounding victory in the elections. It is one thing to promise jobs and another to actually create them. The really difficult part of creating employment opportunities is to ensure that those who are moving out of agriculture and settling down in urban areas are able to find jobs in the manufacturing industry. The growth...

Even as allegations and counter-allegations are traded in and out of courts of law by the promoters and shareholders of Bengal Aerotropolis Projects Limited, the situation on the ground does not raise much hope that the airport-cum-metropolis project will be completed on time. A visit to the project site indicated that many of the facilities promised remain to be built. Roads from the highway to the site have not been built while high-tension electricity lines near the airport terminal and...

It's a unique project boasting of a number of 'firsts'. Coming up at Andal near Durgapur in West Bengal is India's first aerotropolis, a tongue-twister meaning airport-cum-metropolis. What has been showcased as a grandiose scheme that would assist in the economic revival of the state, the project being set up by Bengal Aerotropolis Projects Limited (BAPL) is currently mired in controversies galore. The project has been delayed due to resistance to acquiring land from local people. What is worse...

There is considerable speculation about when the Planning Commission will be reconstituted and who will occupy the largest room in Yojana Bhavan. There are many in the government, possibly including Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself, who are of the view that the Planning Commission is some sort of an anachronistic vestige of India’s discredited socialist past and should be scrapped. However, this is unlikely to happen. One important reason why the Planning Commission is not going to be wound...

If there were some who were expecting Finance Minister Arun Jaitley's maiden Budget to unveil a series of proposals that would curb inflationary pressures in the economy, they are certainly going to be disappointed. Far from reducing inflation, some of the assumptions made in the Budget imply that the government is not at all expecting prices to come down. On the contrary, there is every reason to expect that inflation will persist, and stubbornly so. Here's why. Diesel prices are expected to...