The term “infrastructure” covers all sorts of things, from ports to roads to canals to bridges to building railway lines. Because it covers such a range of things, many of which appear to be useful, most people look upon “infrastructure”…
The corporate-communal alliance that came to power after the 2014 elections needs careful management by its promoters, because within each of the partners of the alliance there are elements that are not altogether comfortable with the other. Within the Hindutva…
July 1991 is widely seen as a watershed month in Indian economic policy making. That was when the Indian government openly declared that it was unwinding the interventionist regime which had been in place since Independence, involving controls on economic…
Globalization was advertised as being beneficial for all, as constituting a bold step towards universal economic betterment. This was clearly wrong; and it was not just Left economists, but even “mainstream” economists like Paul Samuelson who had said so at…
Britain has voted to leave the European Union (EU). And the managers of global capitalism have their hands full addressing the fall-out of ‘Brexit’, even as their efforts to manage the after-shocks of the crisis of 2008 remain unsuccessful. It…
Two years ago, when Narendra Modi led the BJP to a huge victory in the general elections, there was little doubt that the youth of India, and especially those in the Hindi heartland, had played a significant role in this…
Now that we had had two years of the Modi government, it is only natural to look back at what has changed. So we are being treated to numerous assessments of the performance thus far, which obviously vary according to…
The term “involution” – which means to turn into oneself, or to shrink, or to reverse a process of evolving – may seem like a strange one to apply to societies. Yet that is the term that increasingly comes to…
Before the last general elections, two supposedly contrasting images of Narendra Modi were projected by the media: Modi, as the development man and Modi, as the Hindutva crusader. It was argued that he won the elections because of his development…
There was a time when India had one of the finest statistical systems in the developing world. No matter how one interpreted the statistics that came out of that system, one could take the figures themselves as reasonably correct. This…
