A moratorium is not the magic bullet that can slay Bengal’s fiscal demons, several economists have said, pointing out that postponing the inevitable will be of little use unless backed up by a revenue mobilisation road map. Chief minister Mamata Banerjee had yesterday set a 15-day deadline for the Centre to announce a three-year moratorium on the payment of interest on the loans Bengal had taken. “A moratorium on repayment obligations can...

-The Business Standard One correction - and more to come? Several developments in the Supreme Court over illegal mining of iron ore in Karnataka indicate that only the first chapter of a long-running story has been brought to a satisfactory end. The whole story offers a valuable insight into practices of governance and ways of doing business in India. The first chapter began over half a decade ago, with a report by...

How an image-fixated chief minister has bent the state’s media to his will If you haven’t heard of an income tax raid on the residential premises of Nitish Kumar’s close aide and treasurer of the ruling Janata Dal-United (JD-U), Vinay Kumar Sinha, you are not alone. Thanks to the local media, it took a while even in Patna—where the house is located—for people to get to know. This, incidentally, is the...

-The Economic Times   Shibu Joseph ( Why I am Quitting my Job, ET, March 29) suggests, tongue-in-cheek, that he should quit the drudgery of corporate life and, instead, enjoy the "freebies" given to the aam aadmi, like the right to work under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA).  I am not going to write on behalf of the crores of people who work in this programme, because I am...

Arundhati has got it all wrong—the facts speak out against her romantic notions of the tribals’ fight Nirad C. Chaudhary wrote in The Continent of Circe that India’s tribals were mainly found in hill forests. This was because, he reasoned, they had been chased there by the invading Aryans, who displaced them from their river plains. In an essay published in this magazine (Capitalism: A Ghost Story, March 26), Arundhati Roy...