Thursday, November 3, 2011

How to Control Black Money

Prof. P.V. Indiresan, our Chairman, has written a wonderful article on how to control black money. The article appeared in The Hindu BusinessLine in October 2011; the link is here:
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/columns/p-v-indiresan/article2559544.ece?homepage=true

I think that it is a great idea to issue a high value currency note, say Rs.500 and Rs.1000 notes, with a time limit. After the expiry, the expired notes have to be deposited in a bank account to gain value. This way, black money in the form of cash stashed away needs to come out in the open through bank accounts.

comments are welcome.

National Management B School in India

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Reserve Bank of India raises rates

The Reserve Bank of India has raised the rates once again by 0.5% in the belief that this will curb inflation. This seems to me like the behavior of a student in Economics 101 class who simply and blindly believes that the relationship between interest rate and inflation is so straightforward that he uses interest rate as the only answer to handle inflation. I wish our RBI Governor and the mandarins of our macro economic policy are more creative.

National Management B School, Chennai

India-US Joint Statement - Hillary Clinton and SM Krishna

I post below portions of the statement issued by the Indian External Affairs Minister Mr. Krishna and the US Secretary of State Ms. Hillary Rodham Clinton during her visit to India in July 2011, that are relevant to education:

Education, Innovation, Science and Technology
• The United States and India plan to host a Higher Education Summit in Washington DC on October 13 to highlight and emphasize the many avenues through which the higher education communities in the United States and India collaborate.
• The United States and India plan to expand its higher education dialogue, to be co-chaired by the US Secretary of State and Indian Minister of Human Resource Development to convene annually, incorporating the private/non-governmental sectors and higher education communities to inform government-to-government discussions.
• As part of the Obama-Singh 21st Century Knowledge Initiative (OSI), the two governments announced the publication of their requests for proposals from post-secondary educational institutions that support OSI’s goals of strengthening teaching, research, and administration of both US and Indian institutions through university linkages and junior faculty development.
• The United States created the Passport to India initiative to encourage an increase in the number of American students studying and interning in India. The leaders recognized the great bridge of mutual understanding resulting from the more than 100,000 Indian students studying and interning in the United States.
• The United States’ Department of Energy and India’s Department of Atomic Energy signed an Implementing Agreement on Discovery Science that provide provides the framework for cooperation in accelerator and particle detector research and development at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, and Brookhaven National Laboratory.
• The India-US S&T Endowment Board, established by Secretary Clinton and Minister Krishna in 2009, plans to award nearly $3 million annually to entrepreneurial projects that commercialize technologies to improve health and empower citizens. The two sides are strongly encouraged by the response to this initiative, which attracted over 380 joint India-US proposals. The Endowment plans to announce the first set of grantees by September 2011.
• The India-US S&T Forum, now in its tenth year, has convened activities that have led to the interaction of nearly 10,000 Indian and US scientists and technologists.
• As a follow up to the successful India-US Innovation Roundtable held in September 2010 in New Delhi, the two sides agreed to hold another Innovation Roundtable in early 2012.
• India and the United States plan to host their third annual Women in Science workshop in September 2011.

National Management B School, Chennai