Pharma Exports: Global Potential and Errors
Given the potential of rogue pharma exporters to kill off Indian pharmaceutical companies’ global potential, pharma exports must be brought under an export control regime of the kind used to regulate WMDs
TK Arun
TK Arun is a Senior Journalist and Columnist based in Delhi.
The Air India Deal: A Tale of Government in Corporate Affairs
Air India is a commercial airline, albeit newly privatized. Boeing, Airbus, GE, Rolls Royce, and CFM International are all commercial operations. Yet this commercial deal among commercial entities has excited three heads of states, of the US, France, and India, to make joyous announcements, video presentations, and long-distance phone calls attesting to mutual cooperation. Business, after all, does seem to be the business of governments, especially when it is big enough.
The Other ‘Fund Crunch’: How India’s Political Funding limits Inc’s Global Opportunities
If Indian companies are to go global, find global partners accountable to their shareholders and laws that call for clean operations that are at least noiseless, if not quite squeaky and receive inexpensive capital from abroad, Indian politics has to clean itself up.
While we are all proud of India's democracy, few of us bother to fund any political party. We are content to let parties fund themselves by mobilising funds as they traditionally have from the time of the freedom struggle when industrialists like G D Birla used to fund the Congress. But most such funding was informal, with no structured, transparent disclosure of who funded which party and to what extent.
Budget 2023: Maximum Government for Maximum Economy
By Indian standards post-liberalization, and especially by the standards of the Modi government’s pre-pandemic budgets, Budget 2023 is huge: 14.9% of GDP. The government proposes to use its Rs 45 lakh crore expenditure heft to not just boost growth but also to expand the presence of the state to sectors that had escaped its reach. Whether this is a good thing, or a bad thing will depend on the observer’s ideological predilections.
Political Roots of the Budget’s Sobriety
How come the government has shown sober responsibility rather than wanton populism in the last full Budget available to it before the 2024 General Election? We see many pundits struggle with this puzzle on television and in newspaper columns and either remain puzzled or conclude that this government stands tall, beyond the temptations of expedience to which ordinary mortals are prone.
Hindenburg’s bet against Adani
Few can vouch for the veracity or otherwise of Hindenburg’s research that raises serious allegations of wrongdoing against the Adani group. The present author certainly cannot. These charges could be accurate to varying degrees but that does not put Gautam Adani in the company of fly-by-night operators or the likes of arms brokers and others who profit purely from government patronage. Adani is a first-generation entrepreneur who has dreamed big, executed with excellence and has built chunks of the Indian economy’s essential infrastructure, whether ports, power plants, grain storage or renewable energy.