New Issues and challenges

Le gratin of the public sector -always free for free lectures especially if there are from foreign experts - were all there in the front seats avidly imbibing those glimpses of insights on the need to reassess our strategies towards Asia which is gradually imposing itself as the “true engine of global growth”. The lecture of Professor Dan Quah of LSE did touch a chord.

Finance and Planning – Together or Apart?

Now that the need for a Planning Commission is being felt to achieve a proper cohesion in our vision, strategies and implementation capacities, the issue of the demerging of the planning division from MOFEE is again topical. With more reliance placed on government intervention than on markets, a new, specific and separate role for the planning Ministry/Commission,

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR): more of a mess

In these very columns we had said it before that to give a semblance of correcting the private sector bias, a 2% tax was levied on the book profit of the corporate sector to be credited to a fund. We had said at that time that this policy, announced as a watershed in creating a CSR approach that is both voluntary and statutory with the prescribing requirements, is a mere ‘tick the box” approach ;