He who lives by the sword dies by the sword. But since it would be a bit too harsh a proverb to use for the occasion, let’s just say he who tweets to embarrass others often gets embarrassed on Twitter. Congress party general secretary Digvijay Singh is learning it. The “hard way” or not is for him to figure out. For the moment, let’s just say the disconcerting way.
You have had a long association with India and consider it your adopted home. In your latest book you have written about foreigners writing on India. How have you negotiated your location of being an outsider/insider? I take pleasure in being both an outsider and an insider. For most Indians, however long I stay in India, I will always be seen as a foreigner. And
From heading a bank to now being at the helm of affairs at IBA, what is the kind of transition you have had to make? The role of the chairman is that of ensuring the execution of the bank’s commitment. Now, as chief executive of the IBA, I need to ensure that the complete ecosystem is in place so that the banks can fulfil their commitments. [The ecosystem consists]
I t is over fifty years since Lieutenant General Henderson Brooks and Brigadier Prem Bhagat submitted their report on the Indian army’s performance in the war against China. Yet going by the response to parts of the report recently released by Neville Maxwell, it feels almost as if we are back in 1963. Much of the commentary on the report eerily echoes the post-mortems performed in the im
Amid growing anxiety over possible improvement in the global economy, the Asian economy is likely to witness a steady growth rate this fiscal, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) has forecasted. According to a recent report by the bank the Asian Development Outlook (ADO) 2014, the region will experience a slight increase in growth from 6.1 percent in 2013 to 6.2 percent this fiscal f
[Here is the text of the 15th D P Kohli Memorial Lecture Gopalkrishna Gandhi delivered on April 15 in New Delhi. Courtesy: http://cbi.nic.in/speech/15dpk_20140415_chiefguest.pdf] I am grateful to Sri Ranjit Sinha, Director CBI, for giving me this valuable chance. And I take this opportunity
When Medha Patkar, founder of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) and convener of National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM), decided to contest Lok Sabha elections as an Aam Admi Party candidate from Mumbai Northeast, the reactions were mixed. While many welcomed the move, others felt she should have stayed off the electoral course. The Magsaysay award-winning activist tells
I own a house close to the Metro station in Vaishali, Ghaziabad. It’s just a kilometre from Anand Vihar – the ISBT and railway station in east Delhi – and about 15 km on road from Connaught Place, the heart of the national capital. It’s less than half an hour by the Metro; add about 10 minutes for New Delhi railway station Noida, the other hub of the capital region (NCR)
Notwithstanding policies abound world over on tackling climate change, global emission of greenhouse gases grew much faster between 2000 and 2010 than in each of the three previous decades, according to a new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The report, entitled ‘Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change’ says that only major institutio
There has been a perceptible turnaround in Africa’s politico-economic situation. The first decade of the new century witnessed some of the fastest growing economies in the world coming from sub-Saharan Africa. Do you believe that this is a sustainable and irreversible trend? If so, why? It is irreversible. That is something non-negotiable. Because the future genera
Fixed tenure for civil servants is now a part of the All-India Service Rules. The supreme court’s judgement on stability of tenure for civil servants was based on the expectation that insulating them from political interference will lead to efficient service delivery and increased efficiency. This takes a simplistic view of the institutional dimensions of governance, and the desired resul
Ustad Mahmud Mirza is an unusual musician. A top-ranking sitar player who has impressed audiences in India and abroad with his chaste classicism, he is a widely read man who can raise the level of any conversation with his profound observations on literature, art, music, Indian and world politics, religion and philosophy. He was initiated into sitar playing at the early age of six by his matern
Bruce Colville, well-known American writer of children’s books, said, “Withholding information is the essence of tyranny, control of the flow of information is the tool of dictatorship.” It will be democratically incorrect to be associated with tyranny and dictatorship. Our government offices are abuzz with tête-à-tête about the Right to Information (RTI) Ac
Odisha Pradesh Congress Committee president Jayadev Jena is a harried man these days. He is assigned the task of revitalsing his party which is not keen to revive and recover. On Friday he came out with a manifesto full of usual rhetoric and platitudes in a function held at the PCC headquarters. In a brief conversation, he, like a hardboiled politician that he is, displayed his never-say-die sp
Arun Singh, BJP’s in charge (prabhari) of Odisha, is an unassuming strategist. A professional chartered accountant from Delhi, Singh has seen and strategised the recent elections of Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh from close quarters. In this election, he is assigned the task of revitalising the BJP campaign in a state which is virtually written off by the party. In a conversation, Singh
There is a tiny division in the massive Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) of the US. Its size doesn`t denote its importance, or the flurry of activity that’s besieged it recently. The unit, called the unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) office, is mandated by Congressional law to map, document and track all unmanned aerial vehicle flying in American airspace by September 2015. The fl
While bankers may flaunt their FI targets accomplished year after year, TT Ram Mohan, who teaches finance and accounting at IIM-Ahmedabad, admits that inclusion cannot be a one-off achievement. In an email interview with Governance Now, he speaks about the perils of setting unrealistic FI targets and how creating new institutions could mean additional trouble for the central ba
Any kind of growth cannot be sustainable until it is inclusive, that is to say, every section of the society is prospering. It was with this realisation that the concept of financial inclusion (FI) dawned in India. FI is often misunderstood to be limited to banking but it is much more than that. To begin with, it is about reaching out to every household with three banking services &nda
At a time when banks are struggling to get customers outside urban areas, Indian Overseas Bank (IOB) has successfully managed to deepen financial services in the rural and unbanked areas. For the last two years, IOB has been offering agriculture and entrepreneurial credit to the rural poor through a network of self-help groups and business correspondents. IOB, unlike other banks, has directly a
In the early eighties, after completing my post-graduation, I was looking for a job. Journalism was not one of them till I fell in love with a newspaper called The Telegraph published from Calcutta (it was not Kolkata then). Under the stewardship of its dynamic young editor MJ Akbar, The Telegraph was certainly out of the ordinary. Unlike the Delhi-based national newspapers that used to practis
