Over the past seven decades, every prime minister has a band of ‘anointed ones’, the civil servants who translate his or her vision of governance into reality through mature and professional administration.
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November 9, 2018
From Raj to Rafale 3 : Opium of India Inc
In the third part of the series on corruption in modern India, Alam Srinivas explores the intricacies of the illegal exports of Indian opium to China, which enabled most of the country’s well-known business families to become rich and wealthy. Some of them are globally-renowned even today.
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Central Bureau of IRONY
IRONY was writ large when the government took the
unprecedented midnight step of sending the CBI director and his Number 2 on
leave just two days before the annual ritual of Central Vigilance Awareness
Week was to kick off on October 26. Irony was confounded—the theme of this
year’s observance by the apex vigilance watchdog being “Eradicating
corruption—building a new India”.
Mutual Benefit Club
THIS is the story about the six-degrees-of-separation
principle. In personal lives, one can link with anyone anywhere in the globe
through six links—A knows B, who knows C, who knows D, and so on, until the
person G, who is the one that one actually wished to connect with. This rule is
what primarily drives the popularity of social networks.
An intriguing deal
FOR decades, Indian governments, in league with private
aviation players, destroyed the operational and financial foundations of the
state-owned Air India. The public sector entity, which was formed after the
merger of Indian Airline and Air India, bled, and became a loss-making entity
with a huge debt burden. As recently as October 2018, i.e. after the government
decided to auction off Air India, another financial nail was driven in the
airline’s coffin.
Academic autocracy and authoritarianism?
The proposed Higher Education Bill would abolish the somewhat
autonomous UGC and bring higher education totally central control. Under this
Bill, the role assigned to the States is at best perfunctory and militates
against the very grain of federalism.
Exercise in futility
On October 9, 2018, The Economic Times carried a front-page
article under the headline ‘Pay Tax, Get Rewards from the Govt’. It shows that
the Government is looking to put in place an incentive programme to reward and
recognise taxpayers to encourage a culture of tax compliance and a committee
has been set up under Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) to draw up the
scheme for this. Further details are not yet clear.
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