Opinion
India’s bulk move from farms to factories has faltered, clearly, but infrastructure and other forms of investment in villages could create industrial jobs there and revive the country’s broad structural shift away from the farming sector.
Eliott Hill could learn a thing or two from Adidas chief Bjorn Gulden's playbook. With declining sneaker sales and rusty retailer relations, he should get Nike’s designers to craft new sneakers that catch the consumer’s pulse.
The paradigm that has long prevailed is getting shaken up across the planet, with the US just one prominent example. There may be an opportunity in this for us to promote a made-in-India economic model that is truly progressive, socially just and climate friendly.
The film Joker: Folie à Deux would have sent many of us googling what it means. A ‘shared madness.’ But the madness of the ‘mad’ looks like madness, while the madness of the ‘sane’ is heroic—and infectious.
SpaceX’s dominance of satellite communication is a problem that should concern every country. The world must act to ensure that space remains humanity’s common resource and that the market for satellite communication is competitive.
Boards that fire top bosses for extramarital or office affairs have a strong business case as researchers find increasing evidence pointing to a link between problematic personal and professional behaviour.
Those who work on acquiring the three As of Articulation, Ability to foresee trend shifts and Adaptability will be able to negotiate the changing landscape of work amid the advent of AI that is making a human role for low-level work redundant in virtually every field.
The US must hold another TV debate. Quickly. With luck, clarity on the stance of America’s presidential candidates to hostilities in West Asia could send signals to both Israel and Iran that might help bring the region back from the brink.
Indian equities dropped 2.1% on Thursday, wiping out roughly ₹10 trillion of investor wealth. While the risk of a wider regional conflagration in West Asia has risen, China’s equity market appears to be attracting inflows on the back of its stimulus. What are the odds of a market bounce-back?
The UN has a role to play. The international community could lay a foundation to harness AI’s potential, address governance gaps and build an equitable AI ecosystem that serves everyone. We must work collaboratively with inclusion as a key goal.
The US election candidate’s proposals for America include highly restrictive trade barriers, mass deportation of unauthorized immigrant workers and reduced freedom for the Federal Reserve. All this is so risky, it’s hard to tell if he’s serious.
RBI’s growth projection has been hedged by warnings about global uncertainties. While India can do little about foreign factors like war, there’s much within the country to be fixed, ranging from public safety and construction quality to skill mismatches in our jobs market.
The regulator of capital markets has moved to tighten rules on insider trading and offshore derivative instruments while easing the compliance burden of listed companies and offering retail investors more options. On the whole, an impressive range of moves.
strapline: Early estimates from the 2023-24 PLFS point to India’s workforce having grown to around 607 million from 563 million in 2022-23 and Indian joblessness in decline. But headline data masks poor-quality employment and a troubling trend.
This novel investment avenue approved by the capital markets regulator offers a risk-return package within regulatory limits that could possibly lure retail investors away from wild bets in the futures and options market.People will get financial products with varied market strategies to choose from
The government has named Ram Singh, Saugata Bhattacharya and Nagesh Kumar as the three new external members of the RBI's monetary policy committee. As RBI will soon have to decide if and when to switch focus from price stability to economic growth, their disposition is a matter of high interest.
Since February 2023, India's MPC has maintained policy rates, balancing inflation and growth. Recent developments suggest a potential policy shift in October, with food prices stabilising and global rate cuts influencing the RBI's approach towards a neutral stance.
The time taken between a crisis being identified and appropriate actions being initiated is crucial. It calls for scenario mapping that gets off power-point slides and into an organization’s code of behaviour to guide responses.
This yield-less yellow metal has broken a classic pattern, staying strong even as US Treasury yields rose, and now that geopolitical uncertainty is high and interest rates are softening again, it has been hitting new peaks. Yet, on balance, gold looks over-bought.
With a drastic rise in addiction to all that keeps us online, policymakers face the dilemma of securing public health or infringing our personal freedom. By focusing on platform transparency, self-regulation and user education, we can nudge consumers to make responsible choices.
DPI has a clear and welcome role in public service delivery (think Aadhaar), but stretching the use of these platforms for aims that are best left to antitrust authorities (think ONDC) is risky on three significant counts.
Collaboration on electronics system design and manufacturing could help diversify global supply chains, foster innovation and technology transfers, boost trade and investment, and create jobs in India and the US.
Mahatma Gandhi’s legacy is wide, enriching and relevant. Ten years after the Swachh Bharat Mission placed his emphasis on cleanliness in the national spotlight while aiming to end open defecation in India, it’s amply clear that mass upliftment hinges on human agency.
September saw manufacturing in India slow, according to the HSBC purchasing managers’ index for the sector, and global headwinds amid geopolitical tension could mean sub-7% GDP growth in 2024-25. But then, RBI may soon get space for a policy response.
To ease data inflows even from the most privacy-minded of jurisdictions, like the EU, we could join the Global Cross Border Privacy Rules Forum. Since the GCBPR checklist is close to what local privacy norms require, its certification is within the reach of Indian data processors.
Many Big Tech firms have begun by citing lofty missions of making the world better for everyone, only to let these ideals get eclipsed by an all-consuming profit chase. Think Google, Meta and Twitter. Why should ChatGPT-maker OpenAI be any different?
Urban air pollution is bad enough, with our poor record over the past few decades in spite of action plans, but we also face many other resource-related dangers that demand urgent responses right now—before it’s too late.
In the context of today’s digital landscape, where misinformation on brands can spread like wildfire and ‘de-influencers’ have audiences, a court has ruled that social media influencers cannot go scot-free for the content they produce. As truth seekers, though, there is much good they could achieve.
Sebi’s efforts to caution retail investors dabbling with equity derivatives doesn’t seem to be working. Instead of statistics, the market regulator needs to tell stories. Perhaps the same approach could be tried as taken with tobacco addicts.
A post-inflow regulatory regime for foreign direct investment (FDI) may hold some appeal from a governance perspective as geopolitics worsens, but overdoing it will dampen global investor confidence. As we need FDI, this idea needs to be particularly well thought out.
RBI data shows India’s current account deficit widened to 1.1% of GDP in 2024-25’s first quarter. This suits us fine. Barring geopolitical shocks, we can expect a deficit level that’ll help keep the economy largely steady on the external front.
We have lots of data that isn’t adding up to what it should in this age of specialized analysis. India needs to improve the accuracy of inputs used for key national statistics to get a clearer picture of the economy.
Food prices outpacing all else don’t imply unscrupulous pricing. Evidence on margins and markups shows there could be other reasons. The markups could reflect shifts in consumer rather than corporate behaviour, like grocery delivery services which became more popular during the pandemic.
Analysis has shown that with faster progress on energy efficiency, we can bring forward the global achievement of net-zero emissions by almost a decade-and-a-half. We need to make climate action a prerequisite for security partnerships, trade agreements and business.
The investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism, which grants foreign private investors special rights to initiate dispute resolution proceedings against sovereign governments before ad hoc tribunals, is outdated. India’s bilateral treaties should steer clear of it.
