I AND MY WORDS

Yesterday, the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), the municipal body of Bengaluru, uploaded a document that was submitted by an expert committee to the Honourable Karnataka High Court on the issue of garbage (mis)management in the city. A good look at the document shows all that is wrong with the manner in which local governance takes place in India. It is ironic that at the very beginning of this document the committee notes that the garbage disposal issue has in recent times become an issue of grave concern. What it conveniently ignores (though it is not their mandate) that while this issue was growing in menacing proportions, the councillors of BBMP, cutting across party lines, were busy fighting with Vijay Mallya, Anil Kumble, Karnataka Cricket Association (KCA) and the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) for free passes for IPL matches taking place in Bengaluru. Even as you scan across the document, you see how confused and muddled the issue is, with the exp

For all the brouhaha that we have been witnessing from the politicians in outshining each other in their indulgence in corrupt, unethical practices, an important issue keeps coming back to the center of the discussion table. This issue is the issue of how Corporate India has been equally complicit in promoting the quid pro quo way of doing things in India. I remember an interview of Ratan Tata that took place at the time when crisis of confidence in journalism ethics began to surface. The Radia (or is it Radiia?) tapes that had 'leaked' had pointed the complicity of a few Kashmir expert news editors as well as some medium term analysts (I will not take names) among many others. Ratan Tata had joked that work starts after six in the evening in India because Dubai is two and a half hours behind us. This was followed by an interview of K P Singh, owner of DLF, who discretely admitted to having bribed his way to 'success' (or whatever you may call it) and was in fact st

It has been some time now that we have had high inflation rates, and this has been pushed to the extent that for the first time in India we have a situation where housing loans now would perhaps pass on to the children of the lenders post their retirement because of ballooning interest rates spiraling out of control. It does not surprise anyone that this situation of super inflation (as I would call it) does not come under control. There are multiple reasons behind it. I shall talk about a couple of them, and hope others pick the signals up as well. Food prices have gone up across the world. Continuous monitoring by the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) has shown that prices have risen five times since 2007, when food was treated as a commodity and future trading was allowed with the blessing of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and big agricultural giants like Cargill, Dow and Monsanto. This has already created havoc across the world which frighteningly led to food riots in