There are 10 million new subscribers each month, but they're not adding much value - telecom revenues are flat as a chapatti.
India has a huge infrastructure problem and the solution so far appears to be to throw more money at the problem, without much effort to fix the core issues, says Sunil Jain.
He worked on the Delhi electricity privatisation
This has to be one of the most blatant tricks Raja is pulling off.
One lesson the government should learn from the Air India-Indian Airlines merger fiasco is that combining two sick people ends up making them sicker.
The Comptroller and Auditor General has indicted the way the DMRC is run and points to the novel 50:50 management structure that neither of the governments is in charge, so the company is pretty much run by the management, namely Sreedharan.
Despite the reforms of the 1990s, the country's corporate structure hasn't transformed in any major manner.
An economist's steering hand is visible; Budget 2009/10 has a well thought-out reformist touch.
Sunil Jain explains why the government does not necessarily win if it applies a higher gas price.
A forthcoming study based on NCAER data shows a huge income gap that is directly attributable to education levels, says Sunil Jain.
Now that the Bombay High Court has rejected the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas' (MoPNG) attempts to help Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) wriggle out of its 2005 contract to supply 28 million metric standard cubic metres per day (mmscmd) of gas to Anil Ambani's Reliance Natural Resources Limited (RNRL), the pressure on it has increased several times over.
One reason why mobile subscribers haven't shifted companies is that the service is uniformly bad. But now, with new players coming in, the picture could be different, says Sunil Jain.
Decisions are also being pushed on free allotment of additional spectrum to telecom firms, on extending the licence period for 'dual technology' firms like Reliance Communications/Tata Teleservices etc, and on revising merger and acquisition norms. Given how each of these cases is so controversial, even apart from the issue of propriety, it is unacceptable that a government on its last legs should be taking such decisions.
Vote for the BJP if you have to, but not because they're going to bring back Rs 25,00,000 crore and use this to develop roads or provide piped water to India's villages. That's a pipe dream.
There is little doubt that the global economic crisis has worsened Indias growth prospects, but the slowdown began long before the US financial meltdown began.
It'll only be when other states start following this discrimination for a large enough number of products, presumably, that the political class will wake up to it. Hopefully, the courts will too.
India's growth rates may be crashing, but the rates of growth of crashing on the country's roads, and those dying in these crashes, are growing by leaps and bounds.
Perhaps the most sensible thing Goldman Sachs did in an otherwise poorly-researched report on ONGC was to talk of 'corporate governance issues with cash withdrawals by promoter,' says Sunil Jain.
While the government, and market, looks at the year-on-year data for GDP growth of 6.8 per cent, in reality the economy has been growing at only a 4.5 per cent pace (GDP factor cost data).
The Authorities need to realise that a major problem facing this economy, and the world, is deflation, NOT inflation.
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