Several of us had gone to visit a top Indian bureaucrat. While we entered his room and stood, he kept looking at his cell phone with his glasses reflecting his Facebook page. It took him a while to lift his face and recognize us. He perhaps thought we would be impressed by how loaded with […]
Author Archives: Jayant Bhandari
12
Apr
Apr
India is the only country I know, apart from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where after arrival and having done immigration, you need to show the immigration stamp on your passport to another agent seated a mere fifty meters away. When entering the airport, you must show your ID and boarding pass several times to […]
28
Aug
Aug
For the last several decades, the Indian government has announced one mining policy after another. After each change, ministry officials go around international conferences boasting about how India is opening up. The devil is always in the details. And the details are never thought out. Policies are utopian, unrealistic, distant from ground realities, and based […]
15
May
May
To control the spread of coronavirus, India went into a complete curfew on 24th March 2020. For the last two months of this ongoing curfew, the Indian government has repeatedly asserted success. How valid is their claim? And was the lockdown justifiable from a cost-benefit perspective? The government says that it instructed all arriving international […]
22
Feb
Feb
Indian media is going crazy about India having discovered a major mine in UP. India has claimed to have found a mine containing 3,500 tonnes of gold. This would be, by a massive margin, the biggest gold mine in the world, in a country where there is today only one small gold mine. This gold […]