If youve had too much to eat, the best thing to do is fast for a while and give the body time to digest the stuff. If you dont like fasting, but still want to continue consuming, you have to find

Money for infrastructure

Business Standard

The Suresh Chandra committee on dereservation has recommended that the production of 85 consumer items need not any longer be reserved for the small scale industries (SSI) sector. 


Protection racket

Is there a good reason for bank shares to shine now? The BSE Bankex has risen by 1314 per cent over the last one month at a time when interest rate worries should have made investors wary. Has

Sudden optimism

If the revival of the monsoon in August dispelled fears of a drought similar to the one in 2002, September seems to have changed the mood once again. 


Wrong call

This week will mark the half-way point of the fiscal year. A combination of economics and politics has made the first half of 2004-05 an unusually eventful period. 


At the half-way mark

On May 18, Sonia Gandhi paid heed to her inner voice and declined to become prime minister and, instead, appointed Dr Manmohan Singh to the job. Many people still thought that real power vested with

The inner voice speaks

Some of the fears about speculator-driven turmoil in commodity futures trading seem to be coming true. The guar seed, seldom viewed as a commodity of any significance, has seen mayhem in the market

Paying for past sins

While the proposed Board for Restructuring of Public Sector Enterprises (BRPSE) is expected to focus on reviving troubled government-owned enterprises, one of the areas it would do well to spend some

Public accountability

Higher oil prices spooked the bond market on Tuesday, raising the yield on the 10-year government bond from 6.12 per cent to 6.20 per cent. Thats not a big deal, considering that the year-on-year

A case for tightening

If the continuing sabotage in Iraq and the terror attacks on US firms involved in oil production in Dhahran in Saudi Arabia weren't enough to give the oil market the jitters, the uncertainty over

Oil spill

The high oil prices prevailing so far this year, and the forecast that prices will remain firm for the foreseeable future, mean that India will lose something approaching 2 per cent of its GDP this

The policy challenge

Apart from the huge increase projected in the number of rich households over the next five to six years (the number of crorepati households is to increase from 20,000 in 2001-02 to 140,000 by

Emerging diamond

Come drought and there is talk about drought management. Come floods and the attention shifts to flood management. What the country really needs is efficient water management that will blunt the

Using water sensibly

After more than five years during which interest rates on housing loans moved only downwards, the first signs of reversal have emerged, with HDFC announcing a 25 basis point increase in its benchmark

Bringing the house down

While the government continues to blow hot and cold on the idea of merging the public sector oil companies into two vertically integrated giants, one headed by Indian Oil Corporation and the other by

The urge to merge

The chief merit of the concept paper on the new Companies Act is the decision to have a shorter, more streamlined version of the Act. 


An amendment in halves

The term no-worse off situation, used several times in the TRAI draft recommendations on the Unified Licensing Regime, is the key to the telecom regulators basic philosophy since, at the end of the

Preventing competition

Now that inflation has hit a two-year high of 7.51 per cent, and with real returns on bank deposits deep in the negative territory, its time the Reserve Bank of India took a long hard look at its

While the continuing hardening of global oil prices has ominous portents for inflation, the oil marketing companies are enjoying the good times. But the government too is laughing all the way to the

Circuit breaker on duties

Doctor Singh is back in business. Thats the message to take from Mondays decision to effectively cut the rate of interest paid out on Employee Provident Fund (EPF) balances by one percentage point,

Provident Cut

The vanaspati industry has been passing through a bad patch for a long time. Its troubles are due wholly to the flawed import duty structure for palm oil, the major raw material for vanaspati

Correct the anomaly

Incisive columns and editorial comment by top opinion leaders

Page 320 - Editorial Comment