nilesh

This is a joke! Having a trade agreement with China means we will become a dumping ground for Chinese good which are sold even below cost. Look at the solar energy sector there. Rupee is currently undervalued massively.have FTA with Pak and BD? Pak runs a huge trade deficit and is begging for FE. BD has no absorption capacity for more trade. This article makes no sense and is pathetic. How can $ 500b exports happen? Out of thin air? What is the street other than same old suggestions? This is more than our current goods exports. India needs to build capacity for exports, market its goods better across the world. Improve its logistics better. This is really a pathetic article making no sense, no strategy, no details of what to export, where to export, who to export to? Vietnam is now ‘owned’ by China with Chinese setting up factories there, under Chinese management diverting trade across the border. It runs a huge trade surplus with the US with the Chinese trade with US coming down.

@APanagariya @RBI Completely agree. However, we need to solve for FDI.

Dear @RBI: Do not let the psychology of Rs 100 per dollar determine your policy response. 100 is just a number, like 99 and 101. Whether the oil shortage is short-lived or long-lived, the right response at this moment is to let the rupee depreciate. 1/6

Taiwan makes almost 70% of the world’s semiconductors and more than 90% of the most advanced chips powering your phone, your car, and the AI race. If China controls Taiwan, the Communist Party gains leverage over the world’s most critical tech supply chain. That’s not just a threat to Taiwan’s 23 million people living in a thriving democracy — it’s a threat to global freedom, security, and the future itself.

I checked the trade stats, HSN 17049030. Data prior to 2017 is unavailable. But here is what i found. No consistent export and growth trend. It goes up and down. 2017-18 - 121 Cr 2018-19 - 101 Cr 2019-20 - 77 Cr 2020-21 - 97.36 Cr 2021-22 - 74.82 Cr 2022-23 - 102.28 Cr 2023-24 - 116.69 Cr 2024-25 - 91.50 Cr 2025-26- 132 Cr

West Bengal’s new Annapurna Yojana notified by the BJP govt is perhaps the most aggressive cash-transfer expansion yet. ₹3,000/month to 2.2 crore women translates to nearly ₹79,000 crore annually( almost 20% of Bengal’s entire budget and 27% of its annual revenue receipts.) For context, the earlier Lakshmir Bhandar itself was already costing ₹39,000 crore/year. This effectively doubles the burden. Bengal already carries debt of over ₹8 lakh crore with one of the highest debt/GSDP ratios among major states. Ever since the Karnataka electoral debacle (when BJP touted fiscal discipline and PM launched a scathing criticism of “revdi/welfarism”) it has decided to do the politically pragmatic thing - join the Politically, this may be an extraordinarily potent scheme - direct cash, women-centric targeting, perhaps rural demand stimulus. Also notable is the swift implementation architecture and incorporation of SIR-linked beneficiary verification to preserve electoral roll sanctity and tighten filtering. But economically, the long-term question could be stark stark. Can a state with weak industrial growth and high debt sustainably spend nearly 1/4 of its revenues on a single DBT scheme without crowding out infrastructure, investment and productive capital expenditure? If BJP, having now swept Bengal in a landslide, intends to sustain both this welfare architecture and fiscal stability, it may require generous central backing for industrialisation and infrastructure.

There is no point beating around the bush and lying to ourselves - the performance of the MEA spokesperson when confronted with a belligerent journalist in Norway was pretty abysmal and very subpar. We must have the courage to face our own inadequacies.

Hate to say this at my vintage, but Reuters in Pakistan is ISPR stenography. CNN & Bloomberg sometimes go even beyond. Salt away for media historians those quivering-voice Nic Robertson clips talking of “relentless” Pakistani missile attacks on Indian bases. Only he looked shaken & stirred. In diplomacy this was called clientitis..

THE MEA TOOK THE BAIT. IT SHOULDN'T HAVE. The question was never India’s to answer. If a Norwegian journalist asks, “Why should we trust India?”, that is fundamentally a question for Norway’s leadership. There's no need for India to seek validation from anyone on this account. Too often, the Indian establishment still craves affirmation from legacy Western institutions. That colonial reflex needs to end. India has nothing to prove.

This is totally false. Not an iota of truth in this. There is no question of putting such restrictions on foreign travel. We remain committed to improving ‘Ease of Doing Business’ and ‘Ease of Living’ for our people.

PM @narendramodi Sir this is very very wrong. We need measures to increase exports not this. Large nos travel for overseas business . Cost has gone up tremendously. On top of this, if correct, only add to huge increases in cost. Please review. @nsitharaman @FinMinIndia

Saw the clip where a MLA of TVK, Mustafa mentioning Sanathana Dharma needs to be abolished. I don't know whether Mustafa understands what Sanathana Dharma even means. It was an extremely loose comment. Courts in India have clearly clarified Sanathana Dharma is nothing but Hinduism. No one can eradicate Hinduism. Saying so is morally, ethically and legally wrong. If politicians in Tamil Nadu wants to mean eradication of casteism, it is better to say so. Using the term Sanathana for casteism is inappropriate. Whether politicians would have courage to talk the same way about any other religion?

What TN has shown today, rest of India has been doing for decades. Hindu majority states of Rajasthan, Bihar, Assam, Maharashtra and even Manipur have had Muslim Chief Ministers. Hindu majority Andhra Pradesh, Goa and Kerala have given many Christian Chief ministers. TN is just a new entry to that old club. But the real question worth probing is: how many Muslim majority or Christian majority states have given any Hindu Chief Minister? Zero. Forget Chief Minister, how many Hindu MPs or MLAs have ever been elected from a Muslim majority or Christian majority lok sabha or vidhan sabha seats?? Next to Zero.

In Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, a disabled woman watched her small pottery shop get crushed during an anti-encroachment drive. Her livelihood… shattered with every broken pot. 💔

In defense of reporters and pollsters who couldn't read the mood in Bengal. BJP won 207 seats. TMC won 80. That looks like an 80:20 landslide. But the vote share tells a different story. BJP got 46%. TMC got 41%. A 5 point gap produced a 127 seat gap. That is the nature of first-past-the-post elections. Small swings, massive outcomes. Now consider what this means for the journalists and pollsters everyone is mocking for "missing" it. If you are a journalist traveling across Bengal, talking to people at tea stalls and rallies, you are reading vibes. You are not running a stratified random sample. And when the actual split is 46:41, vibes will not pick that up. Worse, confirmation bias kicks in. You walk into a conversation with a prior. Maybe you believe TMC's welfare schemes have locked in the rural vote. Maybe you think BJP's urban support is overstated. Whatever your prior, you start hearing what confirms it. Then you encounter a silent voter, someone who will not reveal their preference, and unconsciously fill that silence with your own preference. For the pollsters, the problem is even more structural. Axis My India, one of the most credible firms in the business, refused to release Bengal projections because 60 to 70 percent of voters would not answer basic questions. When that many respondents stay silent, your data is compromised at the source. No model fixes that. A 5 point gap could be within the margin of error for most polls. At that range, everything comes down to how you model the silent voters. How you weight the undecided. Every assumption in that gray zone reflects a judgment call. Judgment is human. So before we pile on, remember what the ground reality actually was. It was not 80:20 screaming BJP. It was 46:41 with a large number of BJP voters staying completely silent. That is genuinely hard to read. For anyone.

Seeing plethora of so-called experts talk about tolabazi, cut money, law and order, in west bengal after May 4. Kyun bhai pehle pata nahi tha?

We are in 2026 now. Remember the 10x COVID death claims in India? By now the actual death numbers must have come out and trickled down. Now is the time to collate all that data and test the claims made by all those experts who said COVID deaths were 10x the actual number. But this kind of work needs tremendous resources and that is something no one wants to do because the truth is immaterial. It is what sells at that moment. Our attention cycles are so small that a gigantic number of claims never get tested. They remain in the intellectual landscape like they are the absolute truth.

#BJP is trying its best to avoid any post-poll violence in #WestBengal. No major incident reported. Some over-enthusiasts and turncoats are creating sporadic nuisance. @ECISVEEP @AmitShah @BengalGovernor must handle it with iron hand. Bengalis want freedom from this pathetic culture.

Zero violence for the first time in the history of elections, particularly in West Bengal. Not even a single death in political violence. No booth capturing. No rigging. Record breaking turnout. No controversy around 'missing EVMs', papertrail or VVPAT. Seamless transparent process and real time live data reporting in all five states. In short, of that's the job, then yes, Election Commission has won hands down.

All WB problems of last 50+ years will be shown finally from day one of BJP govt