There is an air of purposiveness about the new government which is heartening.
Government-appointed officers, not below the rank of a joint secretary, will determine the nature of the offence and levy a penalty. But government officers are not judicial officers. Are they qualified to define, for instance, what goes against 'friendly relations with foreign states' and what is 'offensive' content?
It is remarkable that all three states that had assembly elections along with the Lok Sabha polls Andhra Pradesh, Orissa and Sikkim have re-elected the parties that were running their governments till now.
India should welcome the initiative that Mr Obama has taken to attack the tax havens (for they are his real target, not Bangalore), and see what New Delhi can do -- about Mauritius and others.
In dollar terms, exports declined by 33.3 per cent over March 2008, the largest monthly decline yet. For the year as a whole, exports came in at $168.7 billion, significantly short of the original target of $200 billion and also below the revised range of $170-175 billion.
When word gets around that favouritism is de rigueur, it keeps away serious bidders and also ensures that the winners feel they can get away with shortchanging the country.
The warning being issued by many respected economists to governments across the world has been as follows: do not declare victory too soon since the path ahead is a very long one.
The RBI's assessment of the economy, presented as a prelude to the policy announcement, was relatively downbeat. Conceding the persistence of a hostile global environment and domestic weakness, the RBI expects GDP growth during 2009-10 to be 6 per cent. This is slightly higher than the 5.7 per cent that reflects the median of its external forecasters' survey.
Satyam has been saved. It has a credible owner after an auction in which reputed companies had bid, it has survived the last three months without much loss of business or desertion by staff, it has coped with a severe cash crunch and a national asset can now be re-built into an IT services powerhouse.
The govt's move to once again defer the enforcement of detailed nutritional information on packaged food labels is incomprehensible.
In any downturn, the turnaround comes only when investors feel asset prices have bottomed out; when consumer demand has fallen so much that it has nowhere to go but up; and when bankers feel that businesses (or those that remain) are on even keel.
Reliance Communications' third entry into the telecom business, starting with the time it was run under a different name when the Ambanis were an undivided group, has predictably got the mobile industry in a tizzy.
The Securities and Exchange Board of India's decision to subject all Nifty and Sensex companies to a peer review of their accounting statements, may not be a bad idea, if some pitfalls are avoided.
Truckers' have also demanded that different permits to carry goods to different states should be abolished.
Sunil Mittal's race up these rankings to No. 2 marks a triumph of core competence over diversification in India.
A new book delves into the mentality of suicide bombers.
Despite President Bush's attempts to talk up the 20-country emergency summit on financial markets and the world economy, it was hardly surprising that the outcome yielded little in terms of substantive solutions to a problem that goes beyond the immediate threat to global growth.
Clearly not. But to take the case of the Indian airline industry which is in the news, its fleet must be cut by a fifth but it can't do this unless it also has the right to fire workers.
Reliance's entry into the club of integrated energy majors, courtesy the start of oil production in the Krishna-Godavari basin, marks a strategic inflection point for India, as it comes some three decades after the last major find at Bombay High went into production.
Since most projects can be shifted to other states, the problem will be minimal, especially if industry can find ways to make farmers partners in their profits.
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