Category Archives: Analysis

India’s Border Problems

India has border disputes with Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, Nepal, Bhutan, and Myanmar. Are India’s neighbours particularly unfriendly? Is India necessarily so honest that we must trust the map that the Indian government provides us? In reality, any line on the world-map—depending on the scale of the map and the kind of the pen used—represents a […]

Will imposing import duties on foreign electronic products boost ‘make in India’ campaign?

  Recently the government of India raised import duty on electronic items including cellphones and TVs to allegedly boost its Swadeshi campaign of Make in India as well as government revenues (sic). Let us analyze this protectionist policy of government using sound economic laws and see if it is capable of achieving its stated goals. […]

The Realities of “Make in India”

  Until a couple of decades back, Indian politicians were restricted to using only Indian cars, the now extinct Ambassador or Premier Padmini. The cars of the President and the Prime Minister, however, except for the facade, contained engines and other mechanisms imported from Germany, etc. Both companies have since gone the way of the […]

Supreme Court wants to Regulate the Legal Profession

Last Tuesday the supreme court of India expressing concern over growing commercialization of the legal profession with lawyers demanding “astronomical” fees from litigants, which made it difficult for the poor to access justice, the Supreme Court asked the Centre on Tuesday to bring a law to regulate the field and to prescribe “floor and ceiling […]

Pollution and Property Rights

The capital of India New Delhi is once again engulfed in toxic smog. The usual blame games by politicians have begun about the cause of this pollution. The Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal is blaming the burning of crops in the adjacent states of Haryana and Punjab for this pollution. Other major causes cited by […]