Modi's Management Style Dissected

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Even those who do not agree with Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi's divisive politics, and I am one of them, admire his administrative skills. In July, I interviewed him for a TV series called Government At Work, which seeks to dispel the notion that government uniformly does not deliver and the apparatus of governance has become too rigid to encourage innovation. We focused on some district-level initiatives that have either been nominated, or have won, the Prime Minister's award for excellence in public administration. Two of the initiatives that we reviewed were from Gujarat - the Janseva Kendras of Ahmedabad that are a one-stop shop for government services, including land records, and the kitchen gardens attached to Baroda anganwadis which have made green leafy vegetables inexpensively available to children and expectant mothers, raising haemoglobin levels and boosting immunity. These initiatives taken by D Thara (currently deputy municipal commissioner of....

What's the next stop after Geneva?

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I have covered WTO minister-level meetings in Cancun in 2003, in Hong Kong in 2005 and this time in Geneva. All of them ended in failure, disappointment and anger, but the feeling this time was of profound sadness. United States Trade Representative was so overwhelmed with emotion that she left without completing her sentence while speaking to the media soon after the talks broke down. A little later, EU Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fisher Boel choked on her words during a press conference with EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson, who described the failure as "absolutely heartbreaking." Commerce Minister Kamal Nath said he was "disappointed." As one of the persons blamed for being inflexible, he might have been trying to put up a brave front. I am sure he felt a deeper sense of loss. The whole thing came unstuck over the issue of special safeguards mechanism. These are....