Last month, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh exhorted the bureaucracy to be fearless, saying, "Civil servants should fight the tendency of not taking decisions because of the fear that things might go wrong and they might be penalized for that." The PM was just the latest to express concern about increasing bureaucratic stasis-foreign visitors have remarked upon it and even TOI has written about it earlier. But his words have clearly failed...

Remote controls are identified as technical devices which are used for various purposes ranging from the launching of space-ships to the monitoring of toy cars. But of late, these devices are being used to direct policies for nation states which are formally sovereign. We speak here of the powerful lobby of international credit rating agencies like Standard and Poor's (S&P), which has just delivered its sermon that India is no longer...

-PTI Five American trade bodies, including USIBC, have joined hands to oppose efforts of the Indian government to further restrict participation of foreign companies in India's tobacco market. According to reports, the India's Commerce Ministry, on the request of Health Ministry, has proposed to put a complete FDI ban in the sector. Currently, Foreign Direct investment (FDI) is completely prohibited in manufacturing of tobacco and its substitutes, while such investments are allowed up...

Drug smugglers and third-world dictators laundering ill-gotten wealth through secretive banking systems in tax havens is an anachronistic image from crime novels. Leveraging US' remarkable success in compelling tax havens to block terrorist financing, the G20/OECD have successfully persuaded tax havens to improve tax transparency and participate in an international regime of information exchange.  All tax havens have committed to OECD standards for tax transparency and are executing Tax Information Exchange...

-The Economist West Bengal’s populist chief minister is doing badly. Yet she typifies shifts in power in India BUYER’S remorse is common enough in the dusty markets of Kolkata, a delightful if crumbling great city, once known as Calcutta and still capital of the state of West Bengal. Those who buy cheap plastic goods or plaster-of-Paris busts of Rabindranath Tagore, Bengal’s cultural hero, may come to regret their haste. Likewise, many who...