TheJaggi

The Tata Sons board decided on Tuesday (24 February 2026) to defer a decision on giving its executive chairman N Chandrasekaran an extension . The move was precipitated by Noel Tata, Chairman of the Tata Trusts which own a majority of shares in Tata Sons. He asked Chandrasekaran some tough questions on losses in several parts of the conglomerate. Among other things, Noel Tata wanted Chandrasekaran’s extension to depend on the latter giving the board assurances on how he plans to tackle a few key challenges. Among these: stemming losses at Air India and Tata Digital: protecting cash at Tata Sons by monitoring spends in the semiconductor and batteries businesses; maintaining Tata Sons’ unlisted status (the RBI wants it to list, given its size); and finding a way to give the Shapoorji Pallonji (SP) group an exit from Tata Sons. The SP group owns 18.37 percent is Tata Sons, and is the single biggest shareholder after the Tata Trusts. The group also wants to use funds currently locked up ...

The US-based Pew Research Center is one of the world’s best opinion and attitudes research organisations. It is less agenda-driven than many others, even though to call it completely free from inherent biases would be difficult, since its roots are in Christian America. Put simply, I respect it for its non-ideological, non-political approach to finding out what people think all over the world on specific issues and topics. (You can read about the organisation here ). But this can sometimes result in perverse results. Pew’s survey on religious diversity around the world is interesting, but simply lacks enough nuance to warrant serious consideration. Its study of religious diversity uses a simple metric: how evenly various religious groups are represented in each country. It restricts the religions counted to seven categories, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Jew, those with no religious affiliation, and those who don’t fall into any of these categories. The survey compares changes...

The law of unintended consequences suggests that what governments aim for through a particular policy and what they ultimately achieve may be something quite different. Moreover, there may be side-effects that no one may have bargained for. Exhibit A comes from the laudable policy of the Centre to reduce dependence on imported crude oil by steadily increasing the ethanol content in automobile fuels. The goal is to reach 20 percent. According to estimates made by the Economic Survey 2025-26, till August 2025, ethanol blending saved India “more than Rs1.44 lakh crore in foreign exchange and facilitated the substitution of about 245 lakh metric tonnes of crude oil.” Ethanol-blended fuel may also have reduced overall urban vehicular pollution. But this saving has been achieved at the cost of vehicle owners , many of whom have reported lower fuel efficiency and increased wear and tear of some parts. There is, as yet, no study which suggests that the savings on imports are greater tha...

Marco Rubio got applause from a European audience in Munich for reiterating age-old imperialist and supremacist ideas popularised by two academics. One was Samuel Huntington, whose seminal essay, The Clash of Civilisations, published in Foreign Policy magazine in 1993, took the academic world by storm . The other was Niall Ferguson’s Empire: How Britain Made The Modern World. Huntington wrote that future conflicts would revolve around the edges of various civilisations, and not necessarily around nation-states. He also tried to define civilisations by their foundational ideas and ideologies, with the western civilisation being influenced by Judeo-Christian experience. Ferguson defended the idea of the British empire as something that benefited those who were ruled by the largest colonial empire the world has even seen. Rubio’s speech is remarkable not because his ideas are entirely novel, but because they came at a time when Europe has been miffed by Donald Trump’s repeated insults...

  A Bangladeshi writer has written a post-election analysis focusing on what is happening inside his country, and how India must wake up to the new realities there. A Times of India article , written by Shahab Enam Khan, a professor of International Relations at Jahangirnagar University, and executive director of the Bangladesh Centre for Indo-Pacific affairs, is blunt in its analysis of India-Bangladesh relations going forward. It is necessary for India to take note. Indian foreign policy tends to take a rose-tinted view of what happened in 1971, but the new (ie, post-2024) Bangladesh wants to put that behind it and de-emphasise India’s role in that liberation struggle. The author puts the message sharply: “Forget shared history. That’s over”. Khan wants the new relationship to be transactional in nature, with the two countries as equal partners. First off, India’s foreign policy makers must accept that how Bangladeshis want to view their history is their business. Our army help...

A few years ago, when External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar was queried about India’s stance on the Russia-Ukraine war and its alleged inability to condemn the invasion unequivocally, he replied : "Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe's problems are the world's problems, but the world's problems are not Europe's problems." His statement was about pointing out Europe’s hypocrisy in demanding support where its interests were threatened while making no reciprocal gestures when there were threats to other countries elsewhere. But as a rising midi power, India needs to reconsider the proposition that it must only concern itself with its own immediate interests. In a world that is fracturing and becoming more transactional in alliances and trade cooperation, India has to up its game in global diplomacy and involve itself more directly and indirectly in reducing great power rivalries, including facilitating the resolution of conflicts which have a direc...

Now that more details are emerging on the India-US framework agreement on tariffs, the best one can say about it is that it can never be the final word. What we need to accept is that this is what we could salvage in the current context of massive global disruptions precipitated by Donald Trump. Conclusion: we must treat the framework as temporary, and subject to regular reviews and even abandonment, if necessary, when the time comes. The framework is temporary for three reasons. One , there is nothing final about Trump’s decision, and he can turn on a dime if he has gotten up from the wrong side of the bed one day. We cannot know what the second half of 2026 will bring in American politics, especially if the Republican party faces political reverses in next November’s mid-term elections, and the US Supreme Court circumscribes Trump’s ability to write his own personal trade rules. Even assuming Trump lasts his full term, India should seriously consider the option to withdraw or not imp...

 I t is a well-established fact that the cost of capital has a big impact on the private sector’s ability and willingness to invest. In the recent past, the government has stuck to its fiscal deficit targets to avoid crowding out private investment, and the Reserve Bank of India has cut both repo rates and banks’ cash reserve ratio by one percent each, but market interest rates continue to remain stubbornly high. The government’s benchmark 10-year bond yield is around 6.7 percent , much higher than Indonesia, which has the same BBB credit rating. Why are interest rates stuck at high levels when inflation is tamed, and may continue to remain tamed over the next year? The Economic Survey 2025-26 gives two main reasons why this may be so.  First, the states’ fiscal indiscipline is impacting the Centre’s borrowing costs. The Union government’s fiscal discipline has not been matched by state fiscal discipline, thanks to the tendency to promise unconditional freebies to the elector...

If 2026 is to go down as India’s next 1991, when the country reformed massively out of fear of external bankruptcy, the current set of reforms have to be sold to the people. They cannot any more be sneaked in by stealth.  Several reasons why. First , with two major trade agreements under the belt (there is still some time to go before they get formalised), one with the European Union and another with the US headed by a temperamental Donald Trump, the competitive scenario for our agriculture, business and services is going to change dramatically. Unlike smaller free trade deals signed earlier, these two mega-deals will have both winners and losers. There will be political costs to pay if the government is not proactive in addressing the concerns of those who think they will lose. Second, our successful software services companies, till recently one of the best avenues for high-quality jobs, will face a crunch as artificial intelligence-based platforms (like Anthropic’s Claude Cowor...