Spring is in the Air

Winter is out and spring, however short is creeping in. The nation’s capital hardly felt the cold this winter and the famous Dilli ki Sardi seems almost to be a thing of the past. Anyway, with spring comes new hope always and this time our cover story is one of great ambition and fortitude, of young boys and girls in India who have struck it big in the world of business exhibiting their very own brand of enterprise and energy. Being young is wonderful, but being young and rich on your own merit is a badge. To raise enough capital to start a business and maintain it is among the toughest things. These are young men and women in India who have risen and managed to start and develop big businesses into empires and fortunes. So here’s a peek into their secret world.

A month after the last full budget presented by the Modi government, we take a look at the budget, which was largely aimed at Bharat and the poor with not much of a reform agenda. A look at how the budget did in economic and political terms.

With the latest scandal of how businesses repeatedly use public banks to funnel funds, there seems an urgent need to secure the banking system with fail-safe security. Nonperforming assets or NPAs which are basically band loans are spiraling by the year with the banks having to be rolled over by the government. Strangely, there seems to be a move to empower banks with a bail-in provision which would allow them to freeze and seize depositors’ money. With a bail-in, there may be no government bail-out in future. But how real can it be and how dangerous politically?

One of the most revolutionary pronouncements of this year’s budget was, of course, the ambitious healthcare scheme for the poor to be footed by the government. The National Protection Health Scheme in Budget 2018 drew immediate comparisons with the programme of former US President Barack Obama's Patient Protection and Affordable Care — also known as Obamacare. But how similar are these two healthcare missions of the two of the world's biggest democracies?

Apart from these thought-provocateurs, this issue of DW packs an amazing punch of variety from Russia’s action-man President Vladimir Putin to a world increasingly divided in our political column; from our Tech spread to the world of books and lots more.

So Happy Holi and Happy Reading!