Shreekant Sambrani

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Budget 2012: Will UPA surprise?

Finance minister Pranab Mukherjee is obviously a worried man as he gets ready to present the Union Budget on March 16. He has admitted to losing sleep over the mounting burden of subsidies. That is not his only worry.

Everything that could go wrong did

If you believed that the Congress-led UPA government achieved nothing on the economic front this year, think again! It is not every day that you manage to antagonise the entire political Opposition, from the BJP to the Communists, your allies, and some of your own party members as well. Add to that the disappointment of business classes and trade unions alike. The long-suffering aam aadmi and kisan, whose names the ruling combine invariably invoked to justify whatever actions it took (or, as in most cases, did not eventually take), had nothing to cheer them either.

The boom & the spike

If a fortnight is a long time in politics, a week seems like an eon in the Indian economy! The last week began with a whimper on foreign direct investment in retail, but ended with a bang of bad news of mid-year analysis. The first two days of this week made it worse: industrial production didn’t just slow down but

The inflation hocus pocus

Would you trust your physician who, after months of prescribing and increasing the dosage of medication for your persistently high blood pressure, tells you that he may not have been entirely right in his reading of your health but that you will be all right soon?
Something similar has been happening with the Indian economy and the good doctors attending to it. Wrong inflation forecasts have hurt the UPA government’s credibility. That claim is hardly surprising, but the source from which it came recently is. Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission and arguably the second or third-most important economic policymaker in the country, has said words to this effect in a series of interviews, after the inflation rate stubbornly hovered around double digits despite continued tightening of credit.

There are certain immutable laws of military history that repeated attempts at disproving them only end up confirming their veracity.

As a self-confessed hardliner, I must admit that being a part of the team engaged in Indo-Pak Track 2 dialogue has been very interesting.