A Tale of Two Numbers; India's new budget reveals a party still in love with bureaucracy.

Newsweek International, March, 2007

Byline: Gurcharan Das (Das, the former CEO of Procter & Gamble India, is the author of "India Unbound.")

On Feb. 28, India's ruling congress party-led coalition introduced its latest budget, aiming, according to Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, "to lift the poor" and close the income gap. The new plan, however, is no more likely to succeed than past efforts. The problem is best understood by focusing on two numbers hidden in the document. One represents a promise to hire 200,000 new schoolteachers; the other, to grant 100,000 scholarships. These two ...