A friend of mine has sent me a one liner. India’s choices for the elections are between a bluffer, a duffer and a muffler. It isn’t very funny, but it is tragically valid. In a nation of 1.2 billion people we have no men and women of stature, people who can walk tall and make you admire them. Instead, it is all clay feet and straw. Ever since Jawaharlal Nehru talked about &
In a candid conversation with Srishti Pandey at Bank of Baroda`s corporate centre in Mumbai, the bank`s CMD SS Mundra talks about the changing behaviour pattern of borrowers and lenders, his disagreement with some of the Mor panel recommendations and why NBFCs and MFIs should complement banks for achieving the FI goal. Excerpts: It has been almost eight years since financial inc
As India faces acute shortage of health-care professionals a new report suggests the country doesn’t even have a separate national strategy for public health professional education. “There is no official and regular national forum for effective coordination between ministry of education and ministry of health with regards to masters level education in public health,” says the
Let`s analyse the elections, I told Tuki. Yeah, let`s analazyzize, she shot back, pumping her fist in the `cholbe na cholbe na` fashion that is so unfashionable these days. So we decided to do what we are best at: we began analysing, complete with a bowl and scowl – a bowl of potato chips to give us that gravitas of analysing and decoding couch potatoes and a scowl on the respective foreh
Drug controller general GN Singh answers questions in an email interview with Pankaj Kumar: Much is made about your statement that India’s pharmaceutical industry would be closed down if we apply US standards. Do quality standards vary from country to country? The quality of drugs manufactured in the country is regulated under the provisions of the Drugs an
i) Earlier it was "image", now it is "hope": Earlier, the elections were won on image of the party or the leader. So initially many royal families also used to win elections. Now what sells in the electoral space is the hope. India predominantly is a Hindu country as far as the “way of life” definition of Hinduism holds true. So the
Censorship in India has of late become too depressingly common to be surprising. The latest victim is an award-winning documentary film, No Fire Zone: The Killing Fields of Sri Lanka, a portrayal of the last few months of the violent civil war in Sri Lanka. Last week, the Central Board of Film Certification declared it would not grant the film a certificate to allow it to
As an attorney in the United States, Madhu Goud Yakshi’s heart always palpitated for the people of Telanagana. He gave up his law practice in New York after around 3,000 people committed suicide demanding statehood for the region during TDP’s rule in the late 1990s and early 2000s, returned home and dived straight into politics. He fought the elections on a Congress ticket in 2004,
The introduction of Arundhati Roy’s ‘annotated’ version of Ambedkar’s The Annihilation of Caste, The Doctor and the Saint was published in this month’s Caravan magazine as the cover story. It is heartening to see Ambedkar being considered saleable enough by a leading publication. But how? Roy, even best produces a secondary understanding of the text written
Massive red- tape in the country is hindering maximum utilisation of resources. Given the present condition of grids in accessible areas, extending them to rural populations is an expensive proposition. Due to abundant solar energy available in most parts of the country, a better option for a long term scalable and low maintenance solution would be distributed, community level, renewable energy
Background In August 2010 the Government of India tabled a Bill in the Lok Sabha seeking approval for a legal framework whose objective is to protect persons making a disclosure about wrong doing in State agencies. Given India’s recent history of victimisation including murders of honest and upright public servants who dared to make a confidential disclosur
On the day the results of the Delhi election were announced, I wrote an article, Redefining Aam Aadmi (read it here), to mark the turning point in India’s political history. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) had rapidly achieved remarkable results among Delhi citizens in promoting trust, solidarity, and hope a
The Standing Conference of Public Enterprises (SCOPE), an apex body of central government-owned public enterprises, has a mission to improve overall performance and to strengthen effective and sustained engagement of these companies with all stakeholders. Leading the organisation at present is director-general UD Choubey, a former chairman and managing director of GAIL (India) Ltd. In a
The globalised world demands skilled manpower to convert growth opportunities into jobs and stable incomes. With millions of new job-seekers entering the job market every year, skill development has become one of India’s urgent priorities. The 12th Five Year Plan (FYP) has highlighted skill-building as an imperative need to reap India’s so-called demographic dividend. India
Batch after batch, in teaching corporate social responsibility at management institutes, I have egged students to debate the misplaced sense of social responsibility in the way government uses its oil companies in its efforts to balance cost impact on critical sectors and sections of the society. Against my hopes, every time, students have debated it just like our politicians who have kept the
India’s growth may be in early stages of an upward trend, according to a projection by the UN World Economic Situation Prospects 2014 but it warned that the recovery would be slower than previously expected. The report mentioned that India will grow at 5.3 percent in 2014, while it projected marginal increase in the growth prospect for the next year. “India is likely
I am ill-read. I don’t know a ‘good’ book from a ‘bad’ one. And but for the wife, who is far better read than I, the bookshelves at home would have been stacked with a Chekhov or a Dostoevsky or a Tagore next to Leon Uris or a Andrea Camilleri or a Satyajit Ray (not to say, for the life of me, that any of them are either good or bad). And then, perhaps, a copy or t
Excerpts of interview with Akash Agarwal, country head, EC council. EC-Council is the world’s largest certification body for Information Security professionals. Agarwal handles EC Council’s business operations in the area of information security, trainings and certifications for business acceleration. Here he talks about the threat of online (in)security and how knowledge about them
It is almost as if the next Indian elections are going to be based on Riot vs Riot. Like the 1984 riots linked to the Congress will be pitted against the BJP stigma of involvement in the Godhra riots of 2002 and the trading of insult will rise to a piercing crescendo. It is like my daddy is bigger than your daddy has become the leitmotif for the next power era. Now that the
The quality of learning in schools in rural India has declined and remained neglected in the nine years of the UPA government, says the annual status of education report (ASER) 2013 prepared by Pratham, a non-profit organisation. While there has been a lot of improvement in infrastructure, a continuous decline in learning levels is seen since the right to education act (RTE) has been im
