Commentary

Instead of focusing on predetermined fiscal targets that are unlikely to be realised, India's fiscal adjustment should be calibrated to the recovery and a rebalancing of demand from the public sector to the private. This is best done by targeting the structural rather than the cyclical fiscal deficit. There should also be a sharp shift in the composition of the deficit from consumption to addressing supply-side bottlenecks through public investment in infrastructure. Unlike public consumption which can crowd out private demand, public infrastructure investment has higher fiscal multipliers and can crowd in private investment.

The legal geopolitics of the Baglihar and Kishenganga hydroelectric power projects, whose legitimacy under the Indus Waters Treaty has been contested by Pakistan, demonstrates the political nature of technology and the governance of technology need not remain out-of-bounds for non-engineers. In attempting an understanding, this article seeks to step outside the conventional nationalist mode of geopolitical analysis.

J S Verma, who was Chief Justice of India in 1997-98, was an outstanding judge who sought to innovate and create rights and duties, and to anchor these firmly to legal doctrine and constitutional mandate.

A noteworthy conversation that took place in September 1971 between Michel Foucault and Dutch philosopher Fons Elders is to be published for the fi rst time later this year. It reiterates some of the best-known Foucauldian positions on the Enlightenment idea of reason, madness, foreign cultures, and sexuality, while reminding us what Foucault's rare practice of knowing has to offer today.

Even if Bihar is accorded Special Category State status, as its chief minister is demanding, it will not gain much because, by far, the larger proportion of transfers from the centre to the states is in the form of central and centrally-sponsored schemes. In any case, Bihar should be looking at other impediments to development and not an imagined resource constraint.