Good-bye, all you folks at Airport Authority who ran the old airports, and good riddance.
If the government addresses them nevertheless, it will be in response to the charge that it has done little of note in the last four years.
Track the new businesses being started up in the country, and if they are not in the tech sector, the chances are that they are located in Delhi/Gurgaon/Noida. The majority of FMCG companies other than Unilever are in the Delhi area: Nestle, Coke and Pepsi, Dabur, Gillette, GSK Consumer Brands, etc. The same is true of the newer consumer durables companies, like Samsung and LG.
It is of course true that a lot of low-income people can indeed afford mobile phones today, as handsets cost no more than Rs 700.
What was in the world of reasonable oil prices a sunny economy slips into gloom and doom.
If the operating principle is that all members of a family must be given an equal role in the business and that they will not make way for better managers who are not members of the family (in other words, the feudal principle), it is hard to see such a company prospering for long in a competitive market.
This string of silences cannot be explained away as incompetence.
One should be careful when taking advice from experts, and not suspend one's own judgment.
Govt's grand plans often go wrong. Although they seem good in theory, they don't work in practice. For instance, last Pay Commission, which handed out generous pay hikes to central government employees on the unrealistic recommendation (which quickly became an assumption) that the number of such employees would be reduced by 3 per cent each year, totalling up to a cumulative reduction of 30% in a decade. Success comes with a special set of circumstances, not as routine.
We know that the boom years are over; do we know what is coming next?
Whichever side of the debate you are on, there is no getting away from the fact that difficult choices have to be made in a situation where you are asked to fight two contradictory problems at the same time. Investment and growth matter more to some people, but prices are a hotter political problem -- the walk-outs in Parliament are over inflation, not the slowdown. So it is not hard to guess on which issue the government will focus.
Top Indian businessmen are increasingly making investments abroad. They are eyeing acquisitions abroad for a number of reasons including global reach and international market penetration. But the Indian business environment is also a chief cause. Many businessmen regard Indian biz scene stifling & not open enough for free growth. The likes of Vijay Mallya and the Ruias have therefore become technically become non-resident Indians even while they run large businesses in India.
Confidence has dipped about the next set of announcements on quarterly corporate results -- so you have tech stocks going at the scarcely believable price-earnings multiple of 15.
In spite of receiving much criticism for his Budget, it has to be acknowledged that FM Chidambaram has pulled the right strings to increase allocations in various schemes. He has effectively curbed govt's spending and has also seen to it that money is not misdirected to wrong pockets. Confronted by political demands, he has responsibly maintained fiscal health and political agendas. He has shown finesse in handling political games and deserves credit for his accomplishments.
While investors' money is going down the drain, merchant bankers are drawing fat pay packages.
The creation of the Nano ranks with major pioneering attempts in manufacturing. It is thus fair to say that Ratan Tata has written himself into the history books.
As the country slips into a new year, the defining reality about the relationship between the citizen and the state is the transition, however partial, from the first view to the second. In its own way, the transition has just found expression in the Gujarat elections, and it will be reflected again as 10 more states go to the polls this year, before the big test in 2009.
The time may have come, however, to rue that clever gambit, and to attempt what in contemporary phrasing is called a "de-coupling", because the sins of China are now being visited on India. China will soon be the world's largest emitter of gases that cause global warming; so when you have Chindia on your brain, you blame India as well - though the level of emissions in the two countries is vastly different.
The United Nations Development Programme has just put out its latest Human Development Report, containing the human development index (HDI) for 177 countries, with the data being for 2005. India ranks 128th (with an index of 0.619), which is a notch down from the 127th rank that it used to occupy.
A progressive tax system (in which the rich pay more than the poor) is one in which direct taxes account for more revenue than indirect taxes (which are on goods and services). In that respect, India's period of supposedly extortionate tax rates produced a most undesirable result because the Centre's next direct tax revenue was barely a fifth of its net indirect tax revenue.
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