In a departure from convention, President Pratibha Patil gave a late night telephone interview to a TV channel on India’s moon-landing without the knowledge of most of her staff.
After the emasculation of the IIMs through two-tier board control and a careful process of selection of the “right” board members, comes the bit about the “coordination” that the pan-IIM super board will do amongst the IIMs, bringing them all down to the lowest common denominator.
After the Wall Street Journal created an uproar quoting President Asif Ali Zardari calling Kashmiri insurgents “terrorists”, it is now The Washington Post’s turn to make news in Pakistan.
The report of the IIM Review Committee is finally out. If this were a student report it would get an A on “describing the current problems”, a C on all the sections they call “our analysis” - a C and not a D because some of the arguments made in the analysis are brilliantly tautological.
One of the central questions that interests political scientists, economists, legal theoreticians and public policy-makers is the exact manner in which existing “institutions” — things like rules, customs, and traditions, both formal and informal — affect growth and development.
One hypothesis (the ‘adaptability’ claim) concerns the way in which new rules are produced. Civilian systems are characterised by wide-ranging codification of legal rules, whereas common law systems are distinguished by their reliance on incremental change through the accumulation of judicial precedent.
