Articles by T R Gopalakrishnan

Fun fact: Cooking oil, especially the widely used Sunflower oil, has seen a big jump in price because of the Russian-Ukraine war. Why? India consumes roughly 2.5mt of sunflower oil annually. And much of this is imported from Ukraine. India only produces 50,000 tonnes of it. The war has disrupted that entire trade. So here’s a thought. Incentivise urban communities and farmers to take to growing sunflower. That could lead to being more ‘atma nirbhar’ and a big ‘vote for local’. And who knows, the process may even create jobs. A commodity desperately needed by millions of urban workers across…

International sports has been rocked in recent years with a series of top flight athletes, many of them women, quitting tournaments or giving up the game due to emotional or mental health related issues. The most recent being world number one Ashley Barty, 25, who decided to retire from tennis at the height of her prowess. The reason she gave: Her emotional inability to continue the gruelling physical and mental effort that remaining on top in international sports requires.  International sports stars no doubt face unique physical and mental pressures. It happened to Barty’s competitor Naomi Osaka over a year…

Is India’s annual budget a political exercise or an attempt to frame a stable and long-term development, fiscal and monetary policy framework? If it is the former, the yearly tamasha makes sense. If the latter, it absolutely does not. No sustained development will happen in a system that can change policy from year to year. Certainly a central budget is needed. We need to know how much the government earns and how much it spends, and on what. Defence, foreign policy and managing money matters on the macro scale constitute the budget’s main objectives. Beyond that, what else does the…

“Those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat them”. So wrote Winston Churchill. A chillingly apt truth those in charge of urban governance in India need to learn today. Many lessons of 2020 — public health and livelihoods to name two — went unlearnt. The same lessons and some new ones came to the fore in 2021, especially the images of people running helter-skelter and paying exorbitant prices for that precious cylinder of life-giving oxygen as wave two of COVID ran amok. For me, the sight of students slowly trooping back to schools and colleges was among the…

To explore any workable solution to the problem of air quality in Delhi, one needs to first understand Delhiites themselves. Delhiites have two unique behaviour patterns. One, all laws, rules and regulations apply only to others, not to themselves. A Delhiite caught breaking a rule would call the relative of a relative of a relative to bail him out rather than obey the rule. The second is whatever goes wrong, like the very poor air quality that the capital is facing right now, is always someone else’s fault. Never their own. No way will they not take out their personal…

Guarantee: An assurance for the fulfillment of a condition (Merriam Webster Dictionary) A trite and tired cliché, but so true. There are no guarantees in life. A truth brought home starkly and tragically to millions of urban workers, as the country shut down overnight in March 2020 to battle the COVID pandemic. And again earlier this year, as the second wave hit. And now, fearful of another lockdown as wave three of the virus threatens to strike, workers are again wondering if they will be left without any jobs. But the bigger tragedy is that those stark images of migrant…

“I am a great believer in the efficacy of the neighbourhood family doctor concept, somewhat in the manner it existed in my parents' time,” says Kanuru Sujatha Rao, a 1974 batch IAS officer of AP cadre and former Secretary, Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. Having spent 20 of her 36 years of government service in the health sector in different capacities at the state and federal levels, Sujatha Rao has extensive experience and expertise on India’s public health issues. Among the many key positions she has held, Sujatha Rao was chairperson of the Portfolio Committee of the Global…

“Hire and fire is a loaded word, the American system is ‘employ at will’,” said Hari T N, Head HR, Bigbasket, one of India’s largest online supermarkets. The distinction sort of escaped me. “Here we have an employment contract.” That was just the point, as we see the continuing and substantial shift in the job market to a contract-based system. “Firms would prefer to employ at will in practice and they are trying to circumvent the hiring and firing laws by having more workers on contract,” added Vidhya Soundararajan, Assistant Professor, IIM Bangalore. The context was a query “On paper…

“I don’t see the pandemic but the hunger and starvation that comes with it as the reason for large scale unrest,” says Manaswini Bhalla, Associate Professor, Economics at IIM Bangalore. The context was the sorry plight of migrant and daily wage labourers stuck in the bigger cities due to the coronavirus lockdown. Now the migrants can go home, says the government With most migrant workers confined to shelters and dependent on charity for survival, the union government’s belated realisation that they should be allowed to get home is no doubt welcome. But there is much that is inexplicable about the…

To lockdown or not to lockdown, that is the question. There are other questions too. To lift the lockdown totally in one go, to lift it partially, or to prepare a calibrated lifting of the lockdown, starting April 15. The pressure cooker comparison may not be far off the mark. As the lockdown continues, the slow build of pressure among people cooped up in their homes can be seen. As also the hope and anticipation of freedom. The social fallout if those hopes are dashed, are in no way predictable. The question is how to enable the gradual release of…