Where Have All The Jobs Gone
Old jobs are being slashed and new ones have slowed down to a trickle. With corporate India shedding staff faster than ever before, the worst sufferers are freshers and middle-level managers.

Preparing For Musharraf
Administrators, securitymen and hospitality merchants gear up to ensure that it's not just the Taj that will impress the visiting
Pakistani President.

Adviser Raj
Bureaucrats don't retire. Their terms are extended or they are reappointed to counsel political mentors.

Out Of Luck Now
It will take more than voter-friendly symbolism to ensure victory in UP.

Hard Cover Up
The Government is perturbed by a cop's unreleased book on Rajkumar's kidnapping.

Connecting Bharat
It's a project to bridge the digital divide. But sources of funding are not known.

FROM THE EDITOR IN CHIEF

Once the good news was that we were isolated from the global economy and not affected by its ups and downs. The bad news, that we lived in a high-cost non-competitive economy. Now, the good news is that we are connected to the world economy but the bad news is that we are affected by every global trend. No wonder economics is not only a "dismal science" but a confusing one.

For the past year, there has been a palpable sense of uncertainty around the health of our economy. It began with the neighbourhood store unable to clear its shelves of consumer goods, moved to the stock market which is limping and has now led to an almost endemic reluctance to invest in new projects. Investment is the lifeblood that keeps an economy moving and it has remained ominously static for the past three years. The impact of this gradual but critical economic slowdown is now being felt at the most personal level: it is beginning to cost urban Indians their jobs.

Our business team has calculated that job losses in the country is now close to a million, every single one of them devastating many more lives. Insecurity is all-pervasive, whether among blue-collar workers or CEOs, whether in the private sector or government-owned industries, established players or start-ups.

It seems the economy is trapped between an ill-prepared liberalisation and a global slowdown.

Senior Editor Rohit Saran who, along with Senior Editor V. Shankar Aiyar, Special Correspondent Malini Goyal and bureaus across the country, tried to understand the true nature of this phenomenon was surprised by the complete lack of unanimity on the understanding of the crisis. "The real problem is that we have no idea how to get ourselves out of this dilemma. Today, there is a strategic and vision paralysis amongst policymakers and economic experts," he says. Maybe that's why the Government behaves like a bewildered innocent bystander while the economy sinks.

(Aroon Purie)

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