Air India — India’s first transnational company — was promoted by the private business house of Tata and J.R.D. Tata in particular, in 1932. After independence, because Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s love of socialism mandated that all important companies should be in the public sector and government managed, Air India was nationalised in 1953. However […]
A citizens’ voluntary organisation that fearlessly exercises its fundamental right of free speech and expression in the public interest is the Delhi-based Association for Democratic Reforms. ADR researches the affidavits all candidates contesting elections to Parliament at the Centre and legislative assemblies are obliged — under Supreme Court directives of 2002-03 — to file disclosing […]
Arvind Panagariya, professor of economics at Columbia University, and Chairman of India’s 15th Finance Commission, has written a brilliant book titled The Nehru Development Model: History and Its Lasting Impact (2024) in which he laments the inorganic Nehruvian public sector-led economy development model imposed upon the country soon after independence. Over 345-pages, Prof. Panagariya proves […]
The trials and tribulations of Shashi Tharoor, Congress party MP from Kerala, highlight how the brightest and best are an endangered species in the grand ‘ole party hogged by dynasts and swamped by a lumpen bourgeoisie hell-bent on getting to the top of the pile.
Academically highly qualified, the author of 25 well-researched history, politics and […]
A recent essay in the The Economist (December 12, 2024) deliberated the proposition ‘Are People Becoming More Stupid?’ According to the normatively anonymous writer of this essay, a fifth of adults do no better in maths and reading than might be expected of a primary school child.
This is also true of India’s political class. The […]
Although India recently celebrated the Golden Jubilee of its elaborately drafted Constitution which confers enviable fundamental rights upon all its citizens, it’s a moot point whether in reality this sovereign, socialist, secular and holier-than-thou republic, is a free country.
This awareness impacted your editor with magnum force during a Sunday morning en famille picnic in Bangalore’s […]
Following the demise of former prime minister Dr. Manmohan Singh on December 26 last year, there’s been an outpouring of national grief. The country’s most eminent political leaders and celebrated economists, including Nobel laureate Dr. Amartya Sen have paid handsome tributes to him as the great liberator who as Union finance minister in the Congress […]
Newly sworn-in President Donald Trump’s inauguration speech promising to crack down and repatriate illegal immigrants in the US to their countries of origin has instilled the fear of God in the Indian establishment which has long turned a blind eye and fudged the issue of why millions of Indians climb every mountain and ford every […]
In India, the demise of automobiles manufacturing tycoon Osamu Suzuki in Hamamatsu, Japan on December 25, didn’t receive the media attention that it should have. With typical ingratitude, the Indian public has forgotten the massive contribution made by him towards revolutionising the country’s moribund motor cars manufacturing industry dominated for half a century by the […]
One of the greatest drawbacks of the Indian economy is the vast gulf that separates Indian academia and India Inc. Whiling away hours in ivory towers, the country’s academics, most of them brainwashed by Nehruvian socialist propaganda that all successful businessmen are crooks and cheats, have little respect for manufacturers of goods and providers of […]
When media pundits and mainstream journalists who tend to focus more on petty politics rather than root development issues pay attention to education matters, your editor who promoted EducationWorld 25 years ago with the mission to make “education the #1 item on the national agenda”, is delighted. But when a respected media pundit through an […]
In an era of extreme income and wealth disparities between India’s richest 10 percent who own 55-60 percent of national wealth and the country’s poorest 90 percent with embarassing per capita income, the national interest demands promoting the savings habit rather than conspicuous consumption. It’s a well-established canon of economics that savings equal investment.
It’s indicative of the naivete of the Indian intelligentsia and media that they haven’t smelt an American Deep State rat in the persecution of India’s premier infrastructure builder Gautam Adani. In February last year, Hindenburg Research, a US-based self-confessed short-seller firm with five employees and no fixed address, charged Adani with using offshore shell companies […]
According to the recently published EdelGive-Hurun India Philanthropy List, digital tech tycoon Shiv Nadar, promoter-chairman of HCL Ltd (market valuation: Rs.5.13 trillion) is India’s most generous philanthropist having donated Rs.2,153 crore (Rs.5.9 crore per day) to mainly education charitable causes in 2024. Runner-up Azim Premji, promoter-Chairman of Wipro Ltd with Rs.1,000 crore and Mukesh Ambani, […]
One of the reasons why higher ed academics tend to scorn this upstream-swimming publication is your editors’ unrelenting insistence for the quarter century past, to raise annual national outlay (Centre plus states) for education to 6 percent of GDP as recommended by the high-powered Kothari Commission way back in 1967, and to allocate a major […]
The passing of Ratan Tata last month aroused bitter-sweet memories of this industry tycoon who I interviewed on several occasions in my previous avatars as editor of Business India and BusinessWorld. In the 1980s the Tata empire ruled by JRD Tata from Bombay House was run by powerful warlords such as Russi Modi (Tata Steel); […]
On every metric the three-day EW India School Rankings Awards 2024-25 conclave staged in the 7-star Leela Ambience Hotel, Gurgaon, Delhi NCR, which concluded on October 19, was a resounding success. This conclave was the follow-up of the EducationWorld India School Rankings Survey 2024-25 — the world’s largest and most comprehensive schools ranking survey which […]
Lutyen’s Delhi is a world apart. Its celebrated bureaucrats and policy formulators with the power to shape the destinies of entire generations — and compliant academics — have little awareness of the grassroots infirmities of the Indian economy. The third Kautilya Conclave was organised by the Institute of Economic Growth (IEG), a Delhi-based think-tank established […]
Last month EducationWorld featured a cover story on raging skilling, upskilling and reskilling fever sweeping the country. Despite the Mahatma’s advice that children should learn with hands apart from head and heart, vocational education has been a blind-spot of the country’s omniscient education policy formulators for over seven decades. And although youth in schools and […]
When the BJP government at the Centre introduced a central GST (Goods and Services Tax) seven years ago to replace widely divergent sales taxes levied by state governments, the initiative was widely welcomed. In the ancien regime, retail prices of goods varied countrywide, because state governments imposed diverse sales tax on goods, often leading to […]
Dr. Ambedkar, widely admired as the father of the Constitution, was right. “What is the village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism,” he observed way back in 1948.
But Dr. Ambedkar could have added another debilitating feature of village India: deep-rooted corruption. The disastrous rule (1947-64) of patrician Harrow School […]
Although ex facie they are modest, humble souls, India’s rural politicians possess a native cunning and smarts difficult to emulate. True, in the early years after independence, lordly zamindars — beneficiaries of the Permanent Settlement negotiated with grandees of the British Raj under which in consideration for annuities the former were granted zamindaris, the right […]
Collective madness best describes successful opposition resulting in the withdrawal of a public advertisement issued by UPSC (Union Public Services Commission) on August 17, inviting applications for 45 professionals in industry, academia and other vocations to serve with the Central government on short three-five year contracts.
Lateral entry of highly qualified and experienced professionals from industry […]
In its second offensive in India, the US-based Hindenburg, a self-confessed short-seller ‘research firm’ of no fixed address and five employees, has targeted Madhavi Buch, the first private sector and woman CEO of SEBI (Securities & Exchange Board of India). She is allegedly involved with an offshore investment fund connected with Vinod Adani, elder brother […]
There’s much to admire about the western seaboard state of Gujarat (pop.72 million). For a start Mahatma Gandhi — the “greatest man in flesh and blood to have ever walked upon this earth” according to Albert Einstein’s memorable tribute — was born there. So was Sardar Patel, not far behind. The people are remarkably hardworking, […]
The media spotlight on pre and post wedding celebrations of Anant Ambani — the last and youngest son of industry tycoon Mukesh Ambani, listed among the world’s Top 20 wealthiest individuals by the authoritative Forbes magazine — has aroused varied and conflicting reaction among public intellectuals and commentators. The bash reportedly cost the amiable, self-effacing […]
Contemporary India hosts 3,500 engineering colleges that graduate 1.5 million engineers annually. Among them are the country’s 23 globally famous IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology), the first of which was established in 1961. But all this investment has provided sparse harvest.
On July 10, a bridge collapsed in Mahishi village in the Saharsa district of Bihar. […]
A blindspot of learned economists and pundits who discuss, debate and analyse the Union — and to a much lesser extent state government — budgets, is the substantial expense incurred by government under the head ‘establishment expenses’. In EducationWorld where thrift is venerated as a virtue, we have been repeatedly whistle-blowing about enormous amounts often […]
General Election 2024 was marked by several extraordinary twists and turns and ups and downs. But surely the sweetest outcome is cutting to size Prime Minister Modi who had begun to believe that he had been divinely commissioned to rule the republic. For the first time since 2014 he has to depend upon hitherto neglected […]
One of the highlights of General Election 2024 is blanket of silence over the wide off the mark prediction of the media — especially telly talking heads — on the outcome. Every TV news channel had predicted that the BJP would cross its 2019 Lok Sabha tally of 303 seats and that the 40-party National […]
One of the many reasons why self-proclaimed Viswaguru India is ranked #134 on the UNDP’s Human Development Index and #126 on the World Happiness Report, 2024 of Oxford University, and way down in the bottom rung of every other index, is that it is a nation without heroes. There is no shortage of domestic critics […]
Despite political party leaders expressing loud intent from every rooftop to eliminate it, government corruption in the southern state of Karnataka is acquiring the momentum of a runaway train with the state set to emerge as the most venal countrywide.
This gloomy prediction is prompted by the experience of a dedicated housekeeper with over three decades […]
Here’s an amazing story of socialist central planning with which the Congress party’s de facto chief Rahul Gandhi continues to be enamoured.
West Bengal’s Ghatal constituency sited 120 km from Kolkata in the rain-fed catchment area between the Shilabati and Jhumi rivers has been suffering severe annual flooding for centuries. In 1959, a Ghatal Master Plan […]
There’s something not quite right about the endless rounds of cricket matches, sports, games and entertainment being served up to the Indian public. Currently, IPL T20 cricket matches are attracting crowds upward of 50,000-60,000 every evening in specially constructed stadia across the country, with matches ending near midnight. Moreover, several multiples of the huge in-stadia […]
Love of luxury and ostentation in a country where nearly a billion citizens struggle for two square meals per day eking out nasty, brutish and too long lives, often — perhaps not often enough — leads to downfall.
The precipitate fall of KC Chandrasekar Rao, who successfully carved Telangana out from the composite state of Andhra […]
A crass remark or provocative statement can change the outcome of a general election. In 2014, Congress worthy Mani Shankar Aiyar’s too clever by half witticism that Narendra Modi, the son of an OBC tea vendor at a railway station who had worked his way up the social and political ladder and served three successful […]
Ex facie it is shocking and a severe indictment of free market capitalism. A thin upper crust of 1 percent wealthiest Indians cornered 22.6 percent of national income in 2022. Income inequality was never so great in the good ole days. In 1951, the top 1 percent bagged 11.5; in 1980, the heyday of neta-babu […]
The dawn of the Internet Age and spread of OTT cinema is one of the positive outcomes of the digital revolution. It has radically transformed Indian cinema and movies, and freed the intelligentsia interested in this story-telling medium from having to compulsorily watch Hollywood and esoteric European cinema, depicting narratives of alien societies and contexts. […]
There’s something rotten in India’s public sector enterprises (PSEs). Although by definition they are owned by the public and all citizens are shareholders, in reality they are the private sector of commissions-hungry politicians and bureaucrats, and those who work in the 256 Central PSEs and an equivalent number owned by state governments.
Green shoots indicate that Indians, who had to endure the rule of pale-skinned foreigners for 500 years, are recovering their self-confidence and ethnic pride. According to a Nielsen IQ 2023 market research study, volume sales of ‘fairness’ creams have declined for the first year ever.
Brainwashed for centuries by light-complexioned invaders including unprepossessing Brits that their […]
- Vedant Gundu, Grade 12 student, Vista International School Leadership is never known to be easy and I know that better than most. Balancing the .....Read More
Former ISRO chairman K. Kasturirangan breathed his last at his Bengaluru residence at 10:43 am on Friday. He was unwell since he suffered a heart .....Read More
