Airlines
Protection in the skies
SOME PEOPLE -- including some as sensible as Mr. Arun Jaitley, Minister in charge of Disinvestment -- may be inclined to suggest that the Indian civil aviation sector, both domestic and international, will now start looking up following the policy decisi ons taken on the disinvestment of Indian Airlines and Air-India. In fact, this should ordinarily be the case because the Government usually takes a policy decision for the good of the sector concerned in the first place, and for the good of the country u ltimately.

Economy
Vision 2020 -- Economics' heart must be in right place
Unless designs of year 2000 are planned to meet the requirements of year 2020 or even 2100, we will be confronted with avoidable bottlenecks. All bottlenecks make the rich richer and the poor poorer. So, if our policy-makers love the poor, they should ke ep production constantly ahead of demand, whatever that demand may be, says P. V. Indiresan

Flip side of economy measures
THE famous economist, Prof. G. K. Galbraith, never missed a chance of having a quip at the cost of conventional economists who would inveigh against all government outlays as evil. In one of his earlier books, he narrated how he had once gone on a trip t o see various mansions, including those of the rich, such as J. P. Morgan, Henry Ford and so on. While he was admiring the elegance of those buildings, he commented almost sotto voce on how well they were maintained, compared with national monuments and government buildings.

Editorial
Paswan's populism
AFTER MAKING A virtual mess of railway finances in his previous avatar as the Railway Minister in a bid to earn the goodwill of 16 lakh employees of the monolith and create vote banks in his constituencies, Mr. Ram Vilas Paswan now wants to play th e role of a messiah to 3.2 lakh employees of the Department of Telecom and Telecom Services. The largesse announced by him to these employees includes rent-free telephones without registration or installation charges, 70 free calls pe r month and a 70-day bonus. He has also promised to regularise the services of over three lakh extra-departmental employees in the Department of Posts as he had done in the Railways.

Miscellaneous
Shaken off
THE hallowed Cambridge University has provoked a raging controversy throughout the English-speaking world by downsizing someone who, hitherto, was regarded as unsurpassable in creative perfection. The immortal bard, William Shakespeare, had till now a question paper all to himself in the examinations of that University in English Literature. All of a sudden, the Board of Studies has decided to abolish that unique status accorded to the poet. He will now be bundled up with the rest of the English writers and poets in a common question paper. Shakespeare-lovers have condemned this as a sacrilege and been insisting on his being restored to his lofty pedestal as the only world poet.

Politics
Fiji drama: The inside story
INDIAN analyses of the Fiji crisis have been over-simplistic, without any focus on the ethnic, regional, religious, economic and political dimensions.

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