Showing 1 - 10 of 56
Cape Town may soon run out of water
News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 25/01/2018
» April 22, Earth Day, might have a bit of extra significance this year. It might be the day that, for the first time, a great world city runs out of water.
What Modi has figured out that Trump never has
News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 21/03/2024
» Excitement and uncertainty used to accompany general elections in India. Polls swung back and forth, coalitions formed and reformed, analysts dissected policy platforms and assessed the prospects of hundreds of individual candidates. As India embarked on its 18th general election campaign on Tuesday, there is no electricity in the air. It is hard to find anyone who believes Prime Minister Narendra Modi will lose his bid for a third term in office.
India's 'no' at WTO may just mean 'not yet'
News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 27/02/2024
» As trade ministers gather at the World Trade Organization's (WTO) summit in Abu Dhabi this week, one of the villains will, as usual, be India. And, certainly, there's some justice to the complaint that Indian negotiators are far too ready to block consensus at such confabs unless granted concessions on their own priorities. Saying "no" often comes too easily to them.
Denials of Sikh separatist plots sound hollow
News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 29/11/2023
» Two months ago, relations between India and Canada deteriorated swiftly when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that prosecutors possessed "credible evidence" that the Indian state was behind the assassination of a Sikh separatist in British Columbia. It now looks like -- if Indian intelligence did in fact arrange that killing -- it may not have been a one-time event. The White House has confirmed that it is "deeply concerned" that there was a similar plot to kill another Sikh separatist, this time on US soil.
Long hours won't help India grow
News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 06/11/2023
» Do Indians not work enough? According to one of the co-founders of the Indian software giant Infosys Ltd, we don't. The billionaire Narayana Murthy said last week that young Indians in particular were picking up "undesirable habits" from the lazy West and thereby holding back India's productivity and its growth. "My request," he said, "is that our youngsters must say, 'This is my country, I want to work 70 hours a week.'"
West's message on war gets lost
News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 09/03/2023
» Here in New Delhi, policymakers are beginning to worry. India's long-awaited presidency of the G-20 grouping is turning out to be even more difficult than they anticipated.
Investment will not bring peace to Kashmir
News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 08/08/2019
» India's parliament has rubber-stamped the government's decision to end Kashmir's 70 years of autonomy and turn it into a "union territory" closely supervised by New Delhi.
Nobody's got a clue on India's poll
News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 14/03/2019
» India's parliamentary elections are like no others in the world. Nine hundred million people are eligible to vote in 2019, for 573 constituencies -- the largest of which contains almost three million voters. The country will take 39 days to vote; some states, like giant Uttar Pradesh with a population of 200 million, will vote in seven stages. And, on May 23, we will get to know who won.
Democrats' 'Green New Deal' isn't global enough
News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 18/03/2019
» At the fourth United Nations Environment Assembly in Kenya this past week, experts and officials from around the world debated how to come up with the investment and innovation needed for countries to grow without dooming the planet. National leaders, NGOs and others discussed how to create more "sustainable patterns of consumption and production". What really struck me in Nairobi, though, was what wasn't discussed: the "Green New Deal" being pushed by Democratic Party politicians in the US.
US reign at World Bank must end now
News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 08/02/2019
» In many ways, David Malpass, whom US President Donald Trump nominated to head the World Bank, is an unsurprising choice. He's a senior Treasury official overseeing international affairs. Plus, his background absolutely screams "Trump nominee": He isn't a woman (Indra Nooyi, formerly of PepsiCo Inc, was being considered). He is an outspoken critic of the institution he is now to head (recall Scott Pruitt's tenure at the Environmental Protection Agency). And he has a controversial Wall Street background (he was chief economist at the ill-fated Bear Stearns), as well as some embarrassing calls in his past (he wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2007 insisting that the housing market couldn't pull down the broader economy).