Around a third of India Inc’s investment plans are in states affected by Naxalism. Anyone who’s been reading Mahesh Vyas regularly, including his piece on today’s OpEd page, knows India Inc’s investment juggernaut has rolled on relatively unchecked, despite the global crisis, for the past five years. The investments on hand, the CMIE (Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy) chief’s calculations show, have the potential of increasing India’s GDP by 50 per...

In one section of the university building where I teach, there is an enormous and motley collection of discarded computer-related items, stacked and piled in an unwieldy mess. This has been lying around for a while now, nearly a year, not only because of the prolonged bureaucratic procedures involved in getting material "written off", but also because no one knows what to do with the stuff once it has actually...

On the day when the commercial release of Bt Brinjal was recommended by the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee, the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) denied that Pusa Basmati 1121 rice (exported to the Middle East) was genetically modified as reported in a section of the Iranian Press. Obviously, the genetically modified rice has no export market, and attempts to brand Pusa 1121 as such were done on trade considerations to...

The Centre has approved the first legally tenable import of electronic waste for responsible recycling, angering environmental groups who say millions of kilograms of domestic e-waste is recycled hazardously. The environment and forest ministry has approved the import of 8,000 tonnes of e-waste by Attero Recycling, a company that has set up an integrated recycling plant for safe extraction of Metals near Roorkee. India generates nearly 400,000 tonnes of domestic...

Output and Growth     According to the [inside]Economic Survey 2017-18, Volume-2[/inside] (please click here to access): • The growth rates of agriculture & allied sectors have been fluctuating at 1.5 per cent in 2012-13, 5.6 per cent in 2013-14, (-) 0.2 per cent in 2014-15, 0.7 per cent in 2015-16 and 4.9 per cent in 2016-17. • The Gross Capital Formation (GCF) in Agriculture and Allied Sectors relative to Gross Value Added (GVA) in...