Opinion

Why India shouldn’t bid for the 2036 Olympics

The $20 billion dollars it would take to host the Olympics would be far better spent at boosting Olympic sporting practice at the local level across IndiaIndia has decided to bid for the 2029 Youth Olympics and the 2036 Summer Olympics. This is a bad idea, for many reasons.As Russia, Brazil and Chin...

Opinion

How India’s economy can grow at 8 per cent every year

The World Bank has forecast India’s GDP growth rate in the current financial year to be 6.3 per cent, similar to the government’s estimate of 6.5 per cent. This will be lower than last year’s 7.2 per cent as the Covid base effect wanes. In other words, we are back to the 5-6 per ce...

Opinion

Success of India’s moon mission feels personal

It is one of those rare moments when a national success feels personal, and may we take the liberty of saying that every Indian must feel this way at the success of India’s moon mission.There is enough jingoism around the success of Chandrayaan-3, and someone righty tweeted that the final mome...

Opinion

The magic bullet for India’s economic transformation

Many years ago, in a shared taxi from Jammu to Srinagar, there was a Kashmiri student going home. He said he had been doing a PhD in Germany to become a scientist. I asked him where in Kashmir he lived, and he said he was from a village in some district. I forget which district, but it struck me tha...

Opinion

Why India is moving towards millets

The Indian government’s obsessive promotion of millets has included demanding the ‘humble grain’ to be used in most official functions. Bureaucrats are said to be suffering from millet fatigue and are on a silent campaign to demand the return of some rice and wheat-based food.Mille...

Opinion

Should Bollywood perish? Many think, yes

Bollywood actor-producer Aamir Khan has identified the reason why OTTs or online movie streaming platforms are hurting Bollywood. The error Bollywood is making, he said in an interview, is that it releases its movies on OTTs just a few weeks after they stop showing in the cinemas.According to him, t...

Opinion

India solves its decades-old population problem

If you grew up in India in the ‘90s you often heard the government slogan. “Hum Do Hamare Do”, meaning ‘We Two, Our Two’, urging families to have no more than two children each.A just-released government study says India has achieved this aim. It is a mystery why we are...