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The article reports on the stock market performance of India. It mentions that country's Nifty so and Sensex indices reached record highs at the end of November, and as to many fund managers desperate for diversification, India looks the most promising alternative. It also mentions that the central bank has been forced to raise interest rates in defence of the rupee impacting its domestic monetary policy.

The article discusses the crackdown on undocumented immigrants in India in 2019. The government has identified millions of people they consider foreigners who have no right to live in the country. Home minister Amit Shah announced plans to deport undocumented immigrants to Bangladesh. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has promised to act on the influx of undocumented immigrants.

The article comments on the move by the government of India to spend too much on defense but wasted much of it. India's armed forces have become among the world's top five after importing more firearms, ships and airplanes. The armed forces are criticized for failing to reform, restructure or revise doctrine. The effort of the defense ministry to address questions about procurement and promotions is also discussed.

The article discusses India's monetary reforms and their impact on the country's economy and institutions. Topics discussed include Prime Minister Narendra Modi's withdrawal of several rupee notes from the market, the objective of Modi's demonetisation policy, the option for the Reserve Bank of India to create new currency liabilities.

This article discusses business reform in Bihar, India related to entrepreneurship, infrastructure, and local corruption.

The debate over "offshoring" has been brewing since a study by Forrester, a research group, in 2002 claimed that 3.3m white-collar American jobs (500,000 of them in IT) would shift offshore to countries such as India by 2015. Stephen Roach, the chief economist at Morgan Stanley, talks about a "new and powerful global labour arbitrage" that has led to an accelerating transfer of high-wage jobs to India and elsewhere. He reckons this is adding to the bias towards jobless recoveries in western economies. Multinationals may in future do original R&D in low-cost places, but for the moment most of the jobs on the move are the paper-based back-office ones that can be digitalised and telecommunicated anywhere around the world, plus more routine telephone inquiries that are increasingly being bundled together into call centres. The offshoring business remains predominantly English-speaking. It is dominated by American and British companies outsourcing their internal operations to third parties in places such as Ireland, Canada and South Africa, but most of all in India. The main advantage of shifting business operations to India and similar low-cost countries comes from a combination of lower wages and the improvement in the quality and price of international telecommunications. But the benefits of offshoring are not confined to lower costs. For one thing, offshoring allows companies to work round-the-clock shifts, ferrying data back and forth from one place to another as the sun sets. For another, it allows them to rethink the way they solve IT problems.

The article talks about Indian political party Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP's) stunning win in the 2017 elections in the state of Uttar Pradesh. It discusses how this win revived Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's losing momentum due to pressure from rival parties and his demonetization attempt to scrap India's paper currency. It also discusses BJP's win in three other states and the efforts of a member of the Hindu volunteer group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh which led to BJP's success.

The article discusses the notion of an endowment effect, which is the tendency of human beings to hold onto possessions. The paper "Endowment Effects in the Field: Evidence from India's IPO Lotteries" by Santosh Anagol, Vimal Balasubramaniam, and Tarun Ramodorai is addressed. Psychological effects of initial public offering (IPO) prices on investors are noted.

The article discusses how countries such as India and China have shown they can move beyond western imitation to homegrown innovation in certain fields, such as telecommunications and information technology. The same is increasingly true of biotechnology, argues a report just published in Nature Biotechnology by a group at the University of Toronto. The study looks at the state of medical biotechnology in six developing countries--Brazil, China, Cuba, Egypt, India and South Africa--and one recently industrialised one, South Korea, to understand what it takes to build a healthy biotech sector. Many of the countries studied, which began investing in biotech in the 1980s, are starting to see the fruits of their labour. The number of scientific papers on health biotechnology published by researchers in Brazil and Cuba, for example, more than tripled between 1991 and 2002. Much of the biotech industry in the developing world is based on copying western innovation. But such generic manufacturing can be a springboard to more innovative activities. India's pharmaceutical firms are playing an important role in the global fight against AIDS by selling generic versions of anti-retroviral drugs at a fraction of the price charged by their western inventors in the rich world. There are plenty of other hurdles that the countries studied in the report need to tackle before their biotech blossoms fully. Brazil needs better links between academia and industry. Egypt's budding biotechnologists are short of cash from both government and private sources. India's regulatory system is slowing down product development. South Africa needs to do more to reverse its brain drain, and train more researchers to boost their ranks.

The article discusses allegations that the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) changed a discussion paper it produced in order to better serve the interests of the telecommunications industry in the country with regards to the issue of network neutrality.

The article looks at sanitary pad use and related economic aspects in India, as of 2013. It profiles start-up company Aakar Innovations, which developed and sells a machine to make pads from agricultural waste, noting they are less expensive than pads sold in the country by international companies such as Procter & Gamble. Topics include income-generating opportunities for women and Netherlands-based consulting firm Women on Wings.

The article discusses how the countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRICS) have helped poorer nations emerge from the global recession. According to the article, the study "Global Financial Crisis Discussion Paper Synthesis (phase 2)" by Dirk Willem te Velde from the Overseas Development Institute found that emerging powers affect the growth prospects of poorer ones. How the BRICS' deals have affected trade and foreign direct investment from the West to Africa are discussed.

This article reports on New Delhi, India and efforts to improve its urban environment. The article discusses plans to reduce plastic bags in the city through a ban and plastic thickness minimums in their production, noting that plastic bags are blamed for floods that occurred in 2005. Information is also presented on noise pollution and smoking bans in India.

The article discusses journalism and mass media in India. "Daily News & Analysis" is the third English-language newspaper launched in Mumbai so far this year. Add the prospect, nationwide, of no fewer than six new cable-television news channels by the end of 2005, and jobs are multiplying and salaries soaring. Competition between the new papers has been fierce already, for market share as well as for staff. India is a good place for journalists not just because new outlets for their work are proliferating, but also because the country is a mine of great news stories. Yet the news wars will not be free of casualties.

The e-choupal initiative in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh is an attempt to join the urban India of rapid growth and a world-beating information-technology industry, to the rural one, where 72% of Indians live, many of them in feudal poverty. In Badamungalaya, farmers use the e-choupal to check prices for their soya beans at the nearest government-run market, or even on the Chicago futures exchange. They look at weather forecasts. They order fertiliser and herbicide, and consult an agronomist by e-mail when their crops turn yellow. The improbable headquarters of this operation is a wood-panelled office of colonial elegance 1,500km away in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). In Virginia House, the 76-year-old seat of ITC, its chairman, Yogesh Deveshwar, is fired with missionary zeal. The e-choupal will "transform the rural life of India". Mr Deveshwar, however, believes that "focus" is a developed-country fixation. Rather than excel in one business, he wants to be India's best in several: other consumer goods besides tobacco, such as flour, cooking oil, matches and salt; hotels; paper, paperboard and packaging; and "agribusiness", out of which sprang the e-choupals. He says these, launched in 2000, will in five years time be more important to the firm than cigarettes. ITC establishes them where it is already buying agricultural produce. Two of the big difficulties faced by the rural economy are mitigated: virtual aggregation disguises the tiny size of most landholdings; better information helps overcome the uncertainty that translates into a reluctance to spend.

If the campaign hype of his opponents is to be believed, Manmohan Singh, India's new prime minister, is taking control of a country well on its way to becoming an economic power. But Singh ascends to power at a time when some economists are starting to question how decisive his reforms in the 1990s actually were. In a recent paper, Dani Rodrik, of Harvard University and Arvind Subramanian, of the International Monetary Fund, argue that India's break with the past happened not in 1991 but in 1980. According to Rodrik and Subramanian, India owes its take-off not to Singh but to Indira Gandhi. When she returned to power in 1980, she stopped breathing populist fire, and sought instead to court the business constituency, whose political backing she craved. This shift in attitude, Rodrik and Subramanian claim, sent a powerful signal to India's cowed industrialists: India was now safe for capitalists to make money.

On paper, at least, India's commercial-banking market is opening up to foreigners. In February 2003 Jaswant Singh, the finance minister, raised the limit on foreigners' stakes in private Indian banks from 49% to 74%. Foreign banks may now set up subsidiaries in India, not just branches. And in recent years the number of new branch licences issued annually has been more than the 12 India promised the World Trade Organisation. Certain events might suggest--at first blush, at any rate--that foreign banks are eager to use their new freedom to buy Indian private banks. On April 23, 2003, foreign investors led by Sabre Capital, a group of four ex-bankers including Rana Talwar, former head of Standard Chartered, a British bank, said they would pay around $27m for 48% of Centurion, a troubled private bank. Mr Talwar's strike follows last year's move by ING, a Dutch bank, to raise to 44% its stake in Vysya, a bank of which it had owned a small slice since 1996. Despite all these positive signs, there is little enthusiasm among foreigners for buying India's private retail banks.