Paranjoy Guha Thakurta

Feb 01, 2011

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta is an educator and commentator

Think PESA, not paisa

The Union government seems to be working at cross-purposes to tackle Left-wing extremism, which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has time and again described as the country’s biggest internal security th

Petro-nomics

Why did the government choose to hike the prices of all petroleum products — including the most politically-sensitive and highly-subsidised kerosene and cooking gas — at this juncture?

Anjan: A man of many facets

He wore his scholarship on his sleeve. He was unassuming and generous to a fault.

Tetchy issues

The Left is demoralised, atrophied into inaction, waiting to be ousted from West Bengal in the Assembly elections scheduled for April 2011 after having ruled the state continuously for as long as 33 y

What the PM didn’t say

The headline writers had a difficult time on Monday evening.

The minority opinion

The May 7 judgment of the Supreme Court on the dispute over the pricing and allocation of natural gas from the offshore Krishna-Godavari basin in the Bay of Bengal has come as a huge victory for Relia

IPL’s bellyache

April.27 : That the Indian Premier League (IPL) had a murky underbelly was not exactly an official secret. Yet when Lalit Modi’s tweet sparked off a chain of circumstances that led to the resignation of Shashi Tharoor, and Mr Modi’s eventual suspension — and which may still claim more victims — few could have imagined the manner in which the nexus between politics, business, sports and entertainment would get exposed in a heady cocktail of sleaze and scandal.

Profits on deposits

April 13 : If you have a savings bank account, have you checked your passbook recently? If the answer to this question is “no”, then do so, for you may be in for a pleasant surprise. You will find that your interest income will soon be going up even if the extra amount that you would now be

Telecom drama, in 3G

March.30 : There is something strange about an auction if the likely winners can be shortlisted before the auction takes place. This is precisely what has happened in the much-delayed auction of third generation (3G) telecommunication licences with electro-magnetic spectrum, a scarce national resource used by mobile phone operators among others. It can be predicted that the maximum number of 3G licences would be bagged by three corporate players, Bharti-Airtel, Vodafone-Essar and Tata Teleservices, while a few would be obtained by Idea, Etisalat and Aircel and Reliance Communications (possibly in that order).

We’re still in recession

March.16 : There is a section that is currently arguing that the world economy will bounce back after the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009, that the “green shoots” of recovery are for real and that the sharp fall in industrial activity, trade and investment was largely a trans-Atlantic phenomenon that originated from and primarily impacted developed countries in the United States, western Europe and Japan. There is reason to believe that none of these propositions are correct.
On the contrary, large parts of the planet are still in the grip of recession, the recovery is slow and the world is unlikely to return to the jobs scenario that prevailed in late-2007 in a hurry. One would be delighted to be proved wrong. But there are many reasons why the prevailing situation does not warrant excessive optimism.

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