Dhiraj Nayyar

Este archivo solo abarca los artículos del autor incorporados a este sitio a partir del 1 de septiembre de 2006. Para fechas anteriores realice una búsqueda entrecomillando su nombre.

A researcher from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras works on Jan. 4 inside a laboratory in Chennai, India. (Idrees Mohammed/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

MundoAsia, ,

Can India create a higher education system worthy of its aspirations as a full-fledged knowledge economy?

That’s still to be determined. But India is on the verge of taking a major, long-awaited first step in the right direction: With the recent release of draft rules by the country’s higher education regulator — the University Grants Commission — India is moving closer to allowing high-quality foreign universities to set up campuses to help meet the country’s growing appetite for advanced education.

Crucially, under the rules, which will have to be approved by Parliament, foreign universities would get the freedom to decide their own curriculums, fix fees and hire faculty at terms of their choosing.…  Seguir leyendo »

A woman walks past an Air India facility in Mumbai in October 2021. (Francis Mascarenhas/Reuters)

Europa

Until last year, Air India was a chronically underperforming government-owned airline. It hadn’t made a profit in almost two decades and was saddled with $8 billion in debt. Its planes continued to fly only because the government spent billions to keep them operational.

Finally, one year ago, Air India was sold to the Tata Group, the country’s largest diversified business conglomerate, and now it is set to place orders for 500 aircraft worth $100 billion to help it tap into India’s booming aviation market. Its turnaround should encourage the government to privatize the 250-plus other operations it owns.

These include an array of businesses: defense equipment manufacturing, energy generation, telecommunications, oil production, textile making and many more.…  Seguir leyendo »

New iPhone 14 models at an Apple event in Cupertino, Calif., on Sept. 7. (Jeff Chiu/AP)

MundoAsia

If the Indian economy has an Achilles’ heel, it is the country’s manufacturing sector. Despite rapid economic growth since pro-market reforms began in 1991, the share of manufacturing in India’s gross domestic product has remained stubbornly low, at about 15 percent. (In China, it has been about 30 percent in recent years.) Indian growth has been driven by services, most famously in information technology.

The lack of a large, competitive manufacturing sector has consequences. One statistic more than any other captures the consequence of an underdeveloped manufacturing sector: Just over 40 percent of India’s total workforce is still employed in agriculture and allied activities that account for only 18 percent of GDP.…  Seguir leyendo »

A farmworker plants hybrid cucumber seeds in between capsicum saplings at a farm that supplies to Bharti Walmart Pvt. in Malerkotla, Punjab, India, on Monday, Dec. 5, 2011. Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s joint venture with Bharti Enterprises has 14 "Best Price" wholesale outlets and buys from about 2,000 farmers in Punjab and Haryana. Photographer: Prashanth Vishwanathan/Bloomberg

MundoAsia

All of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s grand plans to transform India could be undone by a single, impressively titled law: the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013. Though proposed by the previous, Congress-led government, the act was supported by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, then in opposition, as a sop to Indian farmers. Now its provisions threaten to stymie any projects that require new land on which to build (which in India, means almost all of them). Among other things, the law demands that buyers pay four times the market price for agricultural land, resettle those displaced and undertake a social- and environmental-impact study before starting any construction.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia, ,

Kailash Satyarthi, the co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, is 60. For three decades, he has been a crusader against child labor in India. His co-winner is Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl who in 2012 was shot by the Taliban when she was 14.

I raise this because in India, 14 is the minimum age for children to be employed in defined “hazardous” occupations, including work in factories and in people’s homes. The constitutional guarantee on compulsory and free education follows a similar logic -- all children up to 14 are entitled to an education, which means they have to stay in school through eighth grade.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia

At first glance, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and its central banker Raghuram Rajan make for unlikely bedfellows. Modi is a homegrown politician from a working-class background, a card-carrying member of the Hindu Right who mostly speaks in Hindi. Rajan is a U.S.-educated economist, a liberal whose family was a part of India’s civil service elite. He's spent most of his working life abroad and speaks only a smattering of Hindi.

Yet their fates are now linked. This week both men reached symbolically important milestones: Modi has passed 100 days in office, while Rajan has finished his first year as governor of the Reserve Bank of India.…  Seguir leyendo »