After having missed the January deadline, the Reserve Bank of India may grant licences to new banks in March as the Bimal Jalan committee submitted its recommendations to the apex bank on Tuesday. "We have submitted report (on
At a town-hall convened by anchorman Rahul Kanwal of TV Today, it was instructive to hear a question addressed by former finance secretary CM Vasudeva to finance minister P Chidambaram. Seated to my immediate right, Vasudeva ever-s
Walter K Andersen is one of the pioneering scholars in the study of the Hindu right. His 1987 work, The Brotherhood in Saffron: The RSS and Hindu Revivalism (co-authored with Shridhar Damle), remains a landmark. Andersen taught comparative politic
There are two uses of the word ‘change’. The first is lofty, big and all of us know it. Let me start with the one that is not so famous, the lesser ‘change’ – the small change, the smaller denomination currency notes,
Over the past two decades, India’s foreign policy has coped quite successfully with the transition from the Cold War international system to one under the American hegemony. During this period, Indian economy has also plugged into and enormo
The overall performance of central public sector enterprises (CPSEs) during 2012-13 has shown an improvement, says the public enterprises survey 2012-13. The 53rd survey brought out by the department of public enterprises under mini
They both arrived like whirlwinds after the latest round of state assembly elections in their respective states and governed with the panache of a tornado. And while anti-corruption activist and RTI campaigner Arvind Kejriwal jumped on to the poli
Keeping to his promise of quitting in the event parliament passes the bill to create a separate state of Telangana, Andhra Pradesh chief minister Kiran Kumar Reddy submitted his resignation to governor ESL Narasimhan on Wednesday afternoon, and it
Arvind Kejriwal may or may not have been a good chief minister, and may or may not be a “bhagoda” – literally an absconder but in this case the cuss word for anti-AAP and primarily pro-BJP commentators on Twitter – but one
The government, on Tuesday, launched “Indian version of Wikipedia”, vikaspedia.gov.in which would provide users information related to agriculture, health, education, social welfare, energy and e-governance in five languages.
Avant-garde urbanism conceptualises the city as an organic entity with an inbuilt and self-evolving consciousness. Very much like a human body. A city’s surface dotted with numerous monuments, lanes, bye-lanes, food courts, festivities and a
When union minister V Narayanasamy said that e-governance in India, which started 10 years ago, is staggering and should move faster, he was bang on. In fact, unlike most of the speakers who sounded more optimistic than their bosses on the stage,
Twenty-eight street vendors from Delhi, Patna, Jabalpur, Jaipur, and Ludhiana among other parts of India are on an indefinite hunger strike at Jantar Mantar in the national capital from Monday (February 17), demanding passage of the street vendors
Union finance minister P Chidambaram presented the Interim Budget for 2014-15 on February 17, 2014. Here are some of the highlights: The planned expenditure will remain unchanged at Rs. 5,55,322 crore. Fiscal and Revenue deficits a
Health secretary Keshav Desiraju was removed – in effect ‘transferred’ to the consumer affairs ministry – for not supporting Ketan Desai, the tainted former president of the medical council of India (MCI), as a crucial hand
Those who are old enough to jog their memories of the 1980s would easily recall that the anti-industry political climate of those times was an outcome of VP Singh’s rebellion against prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. During his stint as finance m
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been part of the business activity of the public corporate sector, it is the private sector that now has to play its role in this area, says Vandana Chanana, general manager CSR, GAIL (India) Ltd.
[This article appeared in the Feb 16, 2014 edition of Governance Now. It was written before Arvind Kejriwal resigned as Delhi chief minister.] The pro-transparency cum anti-corruption movement reinvented as political party, Aam Aa
While the 49 day old Kejriwal Delhi government came to a dramatic end as the Jan Lokpal bill proposal was defeated in the assembly by the Congress and the BJP, Odisha became the first state in country to enact a law for the creation of a Lokayukta
It took Alice in Wonderland longer to slide down the slippery slope than it did the aam aadmi saviour to come a cropper in his own homemade version of Blunderland. The iconic sweater unravelled into a grimy knotted ball of wool. A series o
