Opinion pieces in The Business Line and Business Standard

There are some thought provoking opinion pieces in The Business Line and Business Standard today. Worth reading.

Sharad Joshi's advice to Sharad Pawar, Union Minister for Food and Agriculture, asking Pawar to initiate reforms in the agricutural marketing system and restore property rights for the farmers.

KP Prabhakaran Nair on Exporting food, losing water, where he says with poor productivity in India, exporting of food out of India also implies considerable 'export' of water resources as well.

S Padmanabhan discusses the power crisis in India and suggests ways by which the power sector can be made investor friendly. Discusses in details steps to be taken by the state and central government in terms of guarantees they have given in the past, and asks the governments to stick to the guarantees.

A K Bhattacharya discusses what the Government should do with Public Sector companies. Given that privatising them is not going to happen, the least the Government should do is to get a strong management at the top.

Michael Pinto on why the states should not be investing in sectors which are already well served by private capital. Shows the example of Shipping Corporation of India, where the decision to buy a ship takes more than 2 years, whereas in a private company all it takes is a single board meeting. Despite this, SCI is profitable, at least as of now. But Pinto asks whether it is worthwhile for the state to park its funds in SCI when it could be using this money elsewhere - in education and healthcare. [Couldn't find the URL for this article on the web.]