Banking and Finance
Pricing the rupee right
THE RUPEE has dominated the news in the financial front over the last few weeks. The market seems to be little influenced by the RBI's words and actions. Perhaps, it seems to feel the fundamentals dictate a weaker rupee.
Economy
Human rights and development
A RECENT news report from Geneva says that India has opposed any attempt to place conditions on development aid in the garb of pursuing a ``rights-based approach to development''. On the contrary, the point has been made that the need of the hour is to a
dopt a `development approach' to human rights which, among other things, would not increase the burden of the poor countries.
Editorial
Address the fisc, not the rupee
WITH THE EXCHANGE value of the rupee touching a new low of Rs. 45.85 to a dollar on August 10, the Reserve Bank of India appears to be fast running out of options to stem the slide. The RBI followed up the hike in bank rate to 8 per cent and CRR to 8.50
per cent (in two stages) with measures to suck out the excess liquidity in the economy through repo operations to curb speculation (it has already mopped up some Rs. 18,000 crores within a fortnight). But this did not have much of an impact. Most analyst
s, however, see all this as overkill by the RBI, losing sight, in the process, of the goals of growth and asset creation.
Infrastructure
VISION 2020 -- Rurbanisation: Removing the roadblocks
The rurban habitat is visualised as coming up on either side of a ring road that links a number of villages and consolidates their markets. When fast and frequent transport services are run on the ring road, the group of villages is transformed into a vi
rtual town. This will empower the loop of villages to support a variety of services that were earlier viable only in cities, says P. V. Indiresan.
Miscellaneous
Invertebrata?
THE OTHER day, at a public meeting, the former Chief Election Commissioner-turned-social activist, Mr. T. N. Seshan, denounced the civil servants ``from the chief secretary down to the peon'' as belonging to the zoological category o
f `invertebrata'. Translated into the language once used to describe Prime Minister Ramsay Macdonald and some of his colleagues, it means ``boneless wonders''.
Politics
Indo-Chinese relations -- Towards cooperation, or competition?
For China and India, Asia's largest emerging economies, forging closer economic and political links hinges on settling the long-standing border dispute. But is China interested, asks S. Sethuraman
