The BBC Raid: An Act of Nation building?
How come we carried out this survey on BBC’s offices in Delhi, even as we are going big on our G20 presidency?
TK Arun
TK Arun is a Senior Journalist and Columnist based in Delhi.
A Year of the Ukraine War Standstill Not in Sight
One year on, the Ukraine war is set to escalate. The West is supplying Kyiv with ever more sophisticated weapons with which to continue fighting, and Russia and its leader Vladimir Putin deepen their conviction that they are fighting for the survival of Mother Russia. The shadow of nuclear war has darkened over the world, as never before since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Building New Towns: A Pressing Priority
India has zero plans for building new towns; the only plans available are for urban redevelopment that yield juicy contracts. Redevelopment can accommodate only a tiny fraction of the prospective rise in the urban population. We simply need new towns. Building new towns is a great booster for overall growth.
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
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.