• OPINION

  Butter before guns please, Mr Modi

  News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 17/06/2016

  » The breathless excitement that surrounded Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Washington, DC last week wasn't completely undeserved. By pushing forward Indo-US defence and strategic ties -- in spite of considerable domestic opposition to any de facto alliance -- Mr Modi can claim to have made India stronger. Yet unless he puts similar effort into fixing economic relations between the two nations, much of that progress could be at risk.

• OPINION

  Major tax reform is just the start

  News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 24/06/2016

  » In opening up sectors from aviation to defence to 100% foreign ownership this week, India's government is clearly hoping to signal that its reform drive is revving up again. Next on the agenda may be one of the most far-reaching new measures in years: a long-awaited, nationwide goods-and-services tax, or GST.

• OPINION

  Could India be the first country to get rid of cash?

  News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 22/07/2016

  » 'Black money" -- the colloquial name for a vast network of off-the-book cash transactions and unbanked savings -- is one of India's biggest scourges. Amounting to as much as $460 billion (16 trillion baht) a year, bigger than the GDP of Argentina, all that money lies beyond the reach of the tax authorities, creditors and anti-corruption investigators.

• OPINION

  'Gradualist' reform slowed growth

  News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 26/07/2016

  » On July 26, 1991, Manmohan Singh -- then Finance Minister, and later prime minister for 10 years -- rose in parliament to deliver an address that would transform India. That speech, outlining the first budget of a just-elected government under Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao, launched India's journey of economic reform, dismantling many decades-old socialist-style controls on the private sector.

• OPINION

  Monsanto clash bad for innovators

  News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 31/08/2016

  » Monsanto's many battles with the Indian government have typically been cast as clashes between poor Indian farmers and a giant multinational that's overcharging for its genetically modified seeds. And certainly, the US agriculture giant isn't the most sympathetic of companies. Its seeds are indeed expensive and, in the case of cotton, no longer deliver the returns promised as resistance builds up.

• OPINION

  Manufacturing can thrive before the robots arrive

  News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 16/09/2016

  » One of the most striking ways in which Narendra Modi's government has changed the policy narrative in India is to make manufacturing central to its ambitions. This is an overdue recognition of the fact that India -- whose workforce is overwhelmingly poor and underemployed, and growing at the rate of a million people every month -- needs to create mass factory jobs if it's to prosper.

• OPINION

  State can't fill India's dangerous investment gap

  News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 25/10/2016

  » India's celebrated position as the world's fastest-growing large economy conceals a dangerous weakness: too few people seem to want to invest there. Even by the government's growth figures, private investment is shrinking at an increasing pace -- by 1.9% between January and March and 3.1% between April and June.

• OPINION

  India starts to abandon cash, maybe a bit too fast

  News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 10/11/2016

  » It certainly took everyone in India by surprise. But then, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has a flair for the dramatic. In an unexpected prime time address on Tuesday, he announced that in a few hours, millions of high-denomination currency notes would no longer be legal tender. It was the only way, he insisted, to deal with "the disease" of unaccounted-for income -- or "black money", as it's called in India. "Your money will remain yours," he assured a stunned citizenry -- as long as you get around to depositing it in post offices sometime over the next several weeks.

• OPINION

  Indian protectionism isn't patriotic

  News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 15/12/2016

  » Samuel Johnson got it wrong: Patriotism is the last refuge of the unprofitable. The Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart Online Services Pvt lost 23 billion rupees (about 12.1 billion baht) last year, and so its co-founder and executive chairman, Sachin Bansal, has suddenly morphed into a great champion of local companies. "We need to take a more India-centric approach" to regulation, he told a Bengaluru audience last week, citing Donald Trump approvingly.

• OPINION

  Cash crunch woes only beginning

  News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 06/01/2017

  » 'Give me 50 days, friends," Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked citizens after he cancelled 86% of the country's currency notes. After Dec 30, if Indians saw his decision as flawed, he promised to "suffer any punishment". But, he said confidently, if they could bear 50 days of disruption, they would have the "India of their dreams".

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