The government may be well within its legal rights to censure Air India&rsquo;s Austrian COO Gustav Balduf for breaking his confidentiality agreement and complaining of political interference to a national newspaper earlier this week. But listening a little more closely to Balduf&rsquo;s message may do the airline a world of good, especially now that Air India&rsquo;s four independent directors are also questioning the management. It doesn&rsquo;t take a finance specialist to fathom that Air India is a failed enterprise that is being kept alive only by political will. Anywhere else in the world, a commercial entity that has run up a debt of Rs 40,000 crore on a topline of Rs 8,000 crore would be closed forthwith because no buyer would touch it. But with Air India, the more things change the more they remain the same. Consider the United Progressive Alliance&rsquo;s track record. Since it came to power in 2004, it has pumped in Rs 2,000 crore of taxpayers&rsquo; money into the airline.

AI's flight plight

Business Standard

The age-old conflict between humans and wild animals seems to have intensified of late in India. As the human habitat crawls closer to the edge of what has been for long the habitat of all manner of other beings, the two species have begun to attack each other. In areas around the Jim Corbett Tiger Reserve alone, over 25 villagers are said to have been mauled to death by tigers and nine big cats killed by people in the past 13 months.

Man vs. animal

The Union finance ministry&rsquo;s Economic Survey 2010-11 offers an upbeat view of the state of the Indian economy and its prospects in the foreseeable future. While the document does raise concerns about potential spoilers like inflation, high levels of fiscal and current account deficits, declining levels of foreign direct investment, global economic conditions, including a spike in oil prices, it tends to portray them as transitory.

North Block view

On the face of it, the railway budget points to an improvement in the operating performance of the organisation in the current year (2010-11), compared to the previous year, with the operating ratio improving by over three percentage points to 92.1. This is still below what was achieved under her predecessor Lalu Prasad, but a slight turnaround nevertheless. However, even this has been wrought at a long term cost to the organisation.

Running down the railways

Tatas' return to civil aviation means more competition

Finally airborne

Privatising poorly run state-owned banks made more sense

Not the obvious solution

Why is Azim Premji still something of an exception?

India's tight-fisted rich

What&rsquo;s in a name? A lot. A market of Rs 15,000 crore at home, and $7 billion globally, to be precise. The world&rsquo;s fastest-growing plant, bamboo, is being increasingly hailed as &ldquo;green gold&rdquo;, not just by tribals and craftsmen, but by a new range of businesses, including high-tech ones. The Indian government has got itself into a lexicographic spin on whether bamboo should be classified as tree, grass or weed, because that would determine which ministry will reap the policy harvest of managing this green gold. The dispute over its classification is not new and dates back to British India. The Indian Forest Act, 1927, which forest officials still adhere to, classified palms and bamboo as trees. This has enabled Union and state forest departments to oversee the bamboo trade, with the attendant rental possibilities for the overseers! Plant scientists, on the other hand, view bamboo as &ldquo;grass&rdquo;.

House of bamboo

Has Brussels pushed Greece too far? No, if the austerity demanded by the &ldquo;troika&rdquo; of the European Commission, European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund is anything to go by in return for a second bailout worth euro 130 billion. Yes, if you sympathise with the strikers and protesters on Syntagma Square outside the Greek Parliament in Athens. Between the two extremes lies the fate of not just a small country but the future of the euro zone. Greece&rsquo;s caretaker national government was told bluntly by euro zone lenders that it needed to do more than the euro 3.3 billion cuts it had brought to the table. While the country&rsquo;s political class is largely behind the cutbacks, the nation remains bitterly divided about the extent to which its welfare state should be pruned.

Oversupply of demands

The disease becomes endemic, revealing health system's flaws

Swine flu strikes again

What initially appeared like an open-and-shut case is now embroiled in an unseemly inter-ministerial battle. A few months ago, the trustees of the Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) had recommended that its members would get a 9.5 per cent interest on their deposits for the current financial year. This was a welcome increase of 100 basis points, though the reason cited by the EPFO in defence of the interest rate increase was the fortuitous discovery of surplus money available in its interest suspense account. The auditors had duly qualified this discovery pointing out that it could not verify the available surplus until the EPFO updated the accounts of all its 47.2 million members.

Talk before you shoot

A wave of cynicism is sweeping middle class India about what has come to be seen as &ldquo;governance deficit&rdquo; with a series of skeletons tumbling out of governmental closets with uncanny regularity. That even a highly respected and hallowed institution like the Indian Space Research Organisation can get embroiled in a scam has only added to the mood of cynicism and despair.

The big clean-up

Going by Krishi Bhawan&rsquo;s assessment, it appears that agriculture in eastern India has finally turned the corner, and the region is now food-surplus. The east, despite its enormous potential for agricultural growth, had remained unaffected by the green revolution &mdash; largely due to sustained apathy from the Centre and lack of enterprise on the part of its state governments. There has, however, been a visible change in recent years; the Centre seems to have realised that the second green revolution has to come from the east (Bihar, West Bengal, Orissa, Assam, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and east Uttar Pradesh) and the states have got their act together. As a result, rice output in this region surged to over 56.2 million tonnes in 2010-11, which is more than half of the country&rsquo;s total rice harvest of 96 million tonnes. Overall foodgrain production in eastern India, too, grew by around 12 per cent, against an all-India increase of only 2.2 per cent.

The eastern green revolution

Policy inconsistency and suspicions of favouritism in telecom

The same mistake, again

Steps to prevent exports collapse should help avoid a crisis

Worsening current account

Centre must not see objections to food Bill as hurdles

Forward on food

Strike actually reveals the failure of Indian trade unionsThe two-day general strike called by 11 all-India trade unions in protest against the ruling United Progressive Allianceâ€™s economic policies will disrupt normal life, certainly, but not as much as the trade unions may like. In some ways, that fact reflects both the successes and the failures of liberalisation. For the unions and the political parties that are supporting them â€“ primarily the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party and the parties of the Left Front â€“ the bandh call is a straightforward response to policies that they see as having led to inflation, and a warning against further reform like disinvestment and more foreign direct investment. It seems to have become a feature of Indian politics that protest even by well-established political parties against the chosen policies of a legitimate government requires the entire gamut of inconvenience, intimidation, destruction of property and outright vio

Worst of both worlds

Seven years on, the United Progressive Alliance&rsquo;s flagship rural welfare programme, operated under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, or MGNREGA, continues to have effects that are simultaneously little understood and divisive. As this newspaper reported on Sunday, the past three years, since 2010-11, have seen the average number of workdays per worker it has provided fall, along with a decline in the actual expenditure incurred on the scheme.

What next for MGNREGA?

To those with a statistical bent of mind, India&rsquo;s recent problems with freedom of speech seem now reflected in a major international indicator. India has fallen sharply, by as much as nine places, in Reporters Without Borders&rsquo; World Press Freedom Index for 2013. The country now occupies a rank of 140 out of 179 nations, its lowest since 2002. In fact, the decline has been quite steady for a number of years, which indicates a trend. It is, of course, possible to quarrel with this ranking, which differs with the annual list put out by Freedom House, the older US-based organisation. In the latter&rsquo;s table for 2012, India figures at the 80th position in a list of 197, and well within the top half of the table. Both the rankings put the Nordic countries at the top of the league but, as is to be expected, Freedom House ranks the United States ahead of Britain, whereas the World Press Freedom Index does the opposite.

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