Authors: Manish Agarwal and Yogesh Upadhyaya “Market forces will resolve all issues in the electricity sector.” We hear this often. We believe that unless you work through the details, this is a lazily held view. Electricity supply is very different from products like ball bearings or ice cream — where…

Authors: Yogesh Upadhyaya and Anurag Gupta (this post is written in first person but is the product of thinking and discussion of both authors) When was the last time you were in a good political discussion? A good political discussion, by my definition, is one where the participants learn something…

Does your job require you to explain complex concepts? You could be a researcher, a manager or a student and chances are that you struggle with helping others understand your work. I can help. I have been explaining complex economic, technical and social issues for many years. Here are five…

Running a business is easier if costs are low. This is something I learnt as a cofounder in my company. The lesson was reinforced two years ago, when I met nearly fifty business leaders across the country and talked to them for hours about their businesses. It seems obvious that…

The election results in Punjab may have reminded the Aam Admi Party (AAP) of their sweeping victory in Delhi, but the challenge of running the government would be very different. If governing Delhi, was like life for a DINK — Double Income No Kids — couple, governing Punjab would be…

I know I am going to get some dirty looks for saying this, but I read non-fiction books with a pen in hand. I underline the sentences that I like. I mark references for future. Worst of all, I make notes in the margins. I recently read the book —…

Authors: SR Ramanujam and Yogesh Upadhyaya Punjab and Maharashtra were economic leaders four decades ago. They are no longer in the top 5! Rajasthan used to be a laggard and now has climbed to somewhere in the middle. Last week, one of us wrote a post on how Uttar Pradesh…

The economy of Uttar Pradesh (UP) has grown much slower than that of Tamil Nadu (TN) for more than three decades. This was not always so. The two states grew similarly in the first few decades after independence. What it more, it is not easy to figure out why. These…

Authors: Shankar Subramanian and Yogesh Upadhyaya Around ten years ago, the CFO of an international semiconductor giant shared a startling statistic in an internal meeting. His company was fighting a total of 22 tax cases in the US in various stages of appeal. By contrast, the same company in India…