Most Indians expect their personal happiness will improve over the next five years, posing a concrete benchmark against which to measure the future success of Modi govt
'And so, despite demonetisation, people in business feel safe with Mr Modi,' points out T N Ninan.
'What's on offer for India is to establish a production line here that would be the world's only production line.'
When you say, Make in India, it means, Indians will work for you, but we should create our own brands and create a market for them internationally. Only then, money will come back to India.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on accused the Gandhis of disrupting Parliament to avenge defeat in 2014 Lok Sabha polls.
Modi government has pledged to lay 700,000 kms of broadband cable.
The BJP continuing to look at the Dravidian polity through the religious prism has not worked in Tamil Nadu whereas it has yielded political and electoral results across much of the rest of the country, observes N Sathiya Moorthy.
Sounding the Congress' poll bugle in the state, Gandhi attacked the Modi government repeatedly alleging that it was working with an approach of 'Hum do, Hamare do' -- a term he recently used while speaking in Lok Sabha to claim that the country is being run by only four people.
'People will realise sooner or later that there are no jobs, inflation is unchecked and loads of corruption charges are coming from various states which the government is totally brazen about.'
India was already in the midst of a protracted economic slowdown before the virus hit due to a festering crisis among shadow lenders and declining consumer demand and private investment. Service sector activity in India is still effectively on hold.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi enjoys a close relationship with Shinzo Abe. For Abe, "a strong India is in the best interest of Japan, and a strong Japan is in the best interest of India."
India is Asia's other bad debt headache.
Your promise to protect bankers for their commercial decisions is a huge confidence booster, but how does one define a commercial decision? Are our investigative agencies well equipped to dissect lending decisions of bankers?
Bad loans of PSBs are at Rs 20 trillion. Most of it is, I sense, due to corruption and behest lending. Nobody pays a price for this charade. Not the promoters, the bankers, RBI officials, finance ministry bureaucrats or politicians, points out Debashis Basu.
Union Minister of Commerce and Textiles Piyush Goyal has stirred up a hornet's nest by taking on India Inc, specifically the Tata group, which is among the companies that lobbied against the Modi government's pro-consumer draft e-commerce policies. While Goyal's comments, made at a Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) event, were streamed live on YouTube, the industry lobbying body later edited the video and subsequently withdrew the entire speech. Goyal had said the Tata group and other Indian companies often lobbied for their interest, while ignoring national interest.
In putting the country's economy back on the rails, it is best that Narendra Modi and Arun Jaitley draw on grass-roots feedback and their own practical sense and native wisdom without allowing themselves to be sucked into the quicksand of economic punditry, says B S Raghavan.
Winning against Covid means thinking ahead, at least six months, putting in place the likely scenarios of what might happen, and then planning. Planning is the role of the government. Having planned, it should communicate what and why. Then, get out of the way, recommends Naushad Forbes.
'Any entrepreneur who wants to create companies on blockchain will have to move outside India.' 'A ban will also wipe out the entire asset investing class that has built up in India.'
'The government has stopped our earnings due to the lockdown and must do something for our earnings to restart.'
On the occasion of the Narendra Modi government completing one year in office, Sheela Bhatt/Rediff.com speaks to BJP president Amit Shah who is yin to Modi's yang. Don't miss it!
World trade has been growing slower than world GDP since 2012.
The Modi leadership could lose Election 2024 if a communal flare-up becomes cause for all-round catastrophe, warns N Sathiya Moorthy.
'It will take a long time for people's memory to be misled by a prime minister who is so arrogant and who refuses to acknowledge his own faults.'
Right now, in Modi's Cabinet and in the BJP, there is no challenge whatsoever to Modi's leadership but even those leaders who have some potential, who the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh can think of backing in an unforeseen circumstance, are fast turning into damaged goods, reports Sheela Bhatt/Rediff.com.
'Maybe, India will never be reformed and maybe India will continue to have a quagmire for the rest of history.'
With the Gujarat going to the polls, name calling has peaked this election season with words like neech and Babar bhakt being flung around.
If 'development' and jobs and such things are less important to many than identity, then the BJP can dominate the discourse by stressing the largest marker of identity, which is religious nationalism, observes Aakar Patel.
'There has been far too much overconfidence about the size and composition of the Indian consumer economy,' notes Mihir S Sharma.
'You have to be a total anti-national bozo to shut down the Nokia plant in Sriperumbudur, which was the first large manufacturing plant for mobile phones in India.' 'Why was the unit shut down? Because of somebody's ego.'
Modi sought the cooperation of public in making the "war on corruption" a success and said the wrongdoings of some are being caught only with the support of common people who are coming forward with concrete information about hoarders.
'India should think big: About how in a multi-polar world, India can indeed be one of the poles, rather than being a secondary power that has to worry about 'alignment' with one of the poles. A G3 in other words, India should look to getting others to align with itself rather than the US or China,' says Rajeev Srinivasan.
Gandhi attacked Modi and the BJP while latching on to the bribery allegation made by Narendra Patel, an activist of the Hardik Patel-led Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti.
The Congress leader said there is no clear-cut vision for the country going forward.
Undoubtedly, the Modi government's biggest challenge is to generate jobs for the 1 million Indians joining the work force every month. So, has 'achche din' arrived for all those young Indians eager to find jobs?
Deprecating Prime Minister Narendera Modi's attacks abroad on previous governments, former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah on Sunday saw it as a part of "that whole thing of about me, myself and I alone".
Information technology, not manufacturing or infrastructure, should be the focus of the government while implementing initiatives such as Make in India and Start Up India.
'The BJP has bent. Pakistan has not changed a single thing. It is the BJP and its supporters who have changed. And this is a very good thing,' says Aakar Patel.
Following is the full text of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's address from the ramparts of the Red Fort on the 73rd Independence Day.
'People shouldn't be made to pay a bigger price for being eco-friendly.'
Non-resident Indians (NRIs) are very positive about India
