Businessworld - Ashok V. Desai

COLUMNIST
Ashok V. Desai

Ashok Desai is Consultant Editor of The Telegraph, the premier Calcutta daily, and a columnist in Businessworld, India's foremost financial magazine; his columns are an authoritative commentary on economic events in India. Before his journalistic career, Desai served as Chief Consultant in the Finance Ministry from 1991 to 1993, and helped design the early economic reforms. His inputs in the reform of taxation, trade policy and financial market regulation were particularly notable. In the 1980s, Desai coordinated a large survey of energy research for International Development Research Centre in Ottawa. In the 1970s, Desai taught and researched at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji as well as the University of Sussex in England. Earlier, Desai worked as an economist in National Council of Applied Economic Research in Delhi, where he carried out policy-oriented industrial studies, especially studies on technology development and transfer.

The Market For Sickness (14 Aug 2009)
Corrupt practices in treatment, drug testing and diagnostics in India will have to be cured by doctors alone

What Rural Banking? (01 Aug 2009)
Loans to farmers turned out to be bad business; that is why banks now give only big loans to rural tycoons

Replicating Errors (11 July 2009)
The budget projections were too opti-mistic; the FM having found that out, chose to repeat his mistakes

Medical Ailments (04 July 2009)
American patients pay the world’s highest medical costs because their physicians order too many tests

Were There Any Reforms? (20 June 2009)
The oligopoly in banking has made it difficult for new firms to enter industry, and sustained the old guard

Using The New Freedom (05 June 2009)
The PM should take his time over the budget, and use it to reinforce the economy against the hard times

Philosophy As Management (22 May 2009)
A philosopher would trace management theory from two schools of philosophy — humanism, and rationalism

Rising And Falling Stars (08 May 2009)
ICICI Bank’s business model has run out of steam; it should consider lending to sahukars

The Second Chapter (25 April 2009)
Bhave is innocent, Sebi has erred, and cannot correct itself under Bhave; only PM can set it right

Distress In Gujarat (10 April 2009)
Over a half of the workers in the gem-cutting industry have lost their jobs — more in Saurashtra

An Agenda For Action (27 March 2009)
Inclusive growth is a fine slogan. However, inclusive credit carries an extremely high risk of going bad

An Extortion Racket (13 March 2009)
The government should buy wheat from the market by monthly tenders to cover its requirements

Untouchable India (27 Feb 2009)
McKinsey fires in all directions without bothering to understand the enemy or the terrain

A Spendthrift Confesses (20 Feb 2009)
It's outcomes that matter, not outlays: that was its own FM's dictum that this government threw overboard

Alternatives To Government (13 Feb 2009)
Primary schools are within reach of most children; they'll learn more if they can go to a secondary school

Reading The Tea Leaves (30 Jan 2009)
IT kept India booming for so long; now we need a new, innovative industry to boost the economy

The Rise Of Internet (16 Jan 2009)
The absence of a way to sell content on the internet has adversely affected the economics of newspapers

The Latest Gold Racket (02 Jan 2009)
Taxing gold and jewellery brings little revenue; it only makes smugglers rich and nurtures terrorists

Liquidity Mismatch (19 Dec 2008)
India is not a country of superwise, superhuman regulators. It is a country of voiceless, powerless taxpayers

Lessons Of Bombay (05 Dec 2008)
All import duties should be abolished, and Rupee depreciation should become the prime policy instrument

From Global To Local (21 Nov 2008)
There is a golden opportunity to help our neighbours and forge new, cordial relationships with them

Important First Words (07 Nov 2008)
Our honest Prime Minister has shown the banks the path to unrestrained chicanery & corruption

Downturn India Style (24 Oct 2008)
We are seeing a conventional trade cycle in India — high levels of investment in industry led to overcapacity

Another Brotherly Spat (26 Sep 2008)
Today's finance minister is a different man from the bold and youthful commerce minister of the early '90s

American Views (26 Sep 2008)
The horse was let out of the stable years ago; you can't push him back into the toothpaste tube

An Agreement At Last (22 Sep 2008)
The FTA with ASEAN marks Kamal Nath’s last hurrah, an end to his active but unsuccessful tenure.

Life Without Money (29 Aug 2008)
The new modes of pay- ment based on mobiles and internet would spread faster with a clearing mechanism

Economist Speaks (14 Aug 2008)
The trends we read into figures are not carved in stone; they may decide to change their minds and go up or down

Brazilification Of India (01 Aug 2008)
Members of Parliament brought out of jail to vote were in the same business as robbers on Delhi streets

Chinese Patents Rising (18 July 2008)
Mashelkar was unlucky enough to get Murli Manohar Joshi as minister; the score was love all

Green Cars And All That (04 July 2008)
An average Indian eats less grain in a year than the corn that would be required to make a tank-ful of ethanol

Food Supply And Ethanol (30 June 2008)
Ethanol does not make much difference to liquid fuel output, but it does make a difference to grain output

The Changing Perspective (2 June 2008)
All official figures are approximate; this is true as much of inflation as of GDP and the balance of payments

The Annual Homily (9 May 2008)
Rather than admit things undone, it is best to brazen it out and brag about things done — for vote banks

Econometrics Of Happiness (25 Apr 2008)
Happiness grows as our incomes grow; the more we earned yesterday, the less happy we are today

Productivity Is The Key (11 Apr 2008)
Unless their productivity increases, more wages to agricultural workers from NREG will not raise their incomes

Afraid Of Derivatives (28 Mar 2008)
Import substitution cannot create competitive derivative markets in India; better knowledge of them can

Our Nation's Genius (14 Mar 2008)
Only in our incredible India would someone charged with a crime become the chief of police

What The Figures Tell (15 Feb 2008)
The economy is hurtling towards a serious slowdown, and Reserve Bank is doing its best to ignore it

Education & Employment (01 Feb 2008)
Government schools are jails for children where they learn little; and they are sinecures for teachers

Private Equity And All That (18 Jan 2008)
Sebi and Reserve Bank have made a thriving business out of thwarting the rational impulses of investors

Beat Them In Competition (04 Jan 2008)
The Tatas should create a new experience in luxury liners, or run luxury trains from Norway to Spain

Another Bank For The South? (28 Dec 2007)
Hugo Chavez should persuade Latin American countries to unify their currencies and start a venture capital fund for them

Manufacturing Competitiveness (14 Dec 2007)
India's critic of yore says that Indian industry gets only modest protection and that its prices are no higher than inter-national prices

Deregulating Local Transport (30 Nov 2007)
Public transport needs complete deregulation; competition is the best regulation.

Governance And Government (26 Nov 2007)
Amongst editors' occupational hazards the most potent are lack of time and application to form a robust judgment on public issues

Ban On P-notes: Qui Bono? (12 Nov 2007)
The prospective ban on P-notes is designed to destroy the efficient internal markets for derivatives created by FIIs and to enrich Indian stock-brokers

How It Looks From Raisina Hill (29 Oct 2007)
Indians who have succeeded abroad seldom invest in India; despite the vaunted reforms, India's gov-ernments are still too obstructive

Dark And Murky Corridors (15 Oct 2007)
The politics behind the freight corridors makes them uneconomic even before a single Rupee is spent on them

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