economics Archives - Page 5 of 22

The Three Cs

On May 23, 2020, in a conversation with Nalin Kohli of the BJP, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman spoke about the Emergency Credit Line Guarantee Scheme, worth 3 lakh crore rupees, for small and medium businesses. Banks should lend under it, she said, and “the fear of the 3Cs as they refer to the CBI, CVC, and also the CAG should not be in their minds.”

These are the Central Bureau of Investigation, the Central Vigilance Commission and the Comptroller and Auditor General. She added: “if a decision goes wrong, and if there is a loss, the government has given 100 per cent guarantee now.”

Gold in the Home

In 2019 Somasundaram PR, the World Gold Council’s managing director for India, put the gold held by Indian households at “around 23,000-24,000 tonnes.” The figure came from a study made two years earlier. In 2025 Morgan Stanley estimated household gold at about 34,600 tonnes, worth 3.8 trillion dollars.

Gold to the Bank of England

During the economic crisis of 1991, India pledged its gold as collateral. In April it borrowed 200 million dollars from the Union Bank of Switzerland against 20 tonnes of gold. It then shipped 47 tonnes of gold to the Bank of England.

On May 29, 2026, India’s foreign exchange reserves stood at 682.3 billion dollars. The Governor of the Reserve Bank of India said they covered about 11 months of imports.

Savings from the Household Budget

In November 2016 the government withdrew the 500 and 1,000 rupee notes. Cash had to be deposited in banks. In February 2017 Sushil Chandra, chairman of the Central Board of Direct Taxes, said: “As the Prime Minister has clearly said that (for deposits) up to Rs 2.5 lakh we will not ask (questions).”

In 2021 the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal in Agra ruled that cash deposits by housewives of up to 2.5 lakh rupees were not income. “Women all over the country, had been accumulating cash that they had saved for themselves from household budgets,” it said.

Pretend It Was Performing

In September 2018 Raghuram Rajan, the former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, sent a note on bad loans to the Estimates Committee of Parliament. When a project stalled, he wrote, banks would often extend the loan “by making additional loans to enable the promoter to pay interest and pretend it was performing.”

The Buyer of Old Paper

Raddi means waste paper. The Rekhta dictionary defines the raddiwala as a buyer of old and useless newspapers and magazines. The kabadiwala buys scrap of other kinds from homes.

The People’s Archive of Rural India followed one such buyer. “From the houses he visits, Das buys paper, including newspapers, at Rs. 8 per kilo,” it reported, “and sells it for Rs. 9-9.50 per kilo at the scrap shops.”

The Bullet Train Loan

On September 14, 2017, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe laid the foundation stone of the bullet train from Mumbai to Ahmedabad. Japan lent 88,000 crore rupees of the cost of about 1.08 lakh crore. The loan runs for 50 years at an interest rate of 0.1 percent, and repayment begins after 15 years.

“The bullet train is in a way a big gift from Japan to India,” Modi said. “It is in a way a project being constructed for free.”

No Gun to Our Head

On October 24, 2025, Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal spoke at the Berlin Global Dialogue about India’s trade talks. “We do not do deals in a hurry and we do not do deals with deadlines or with a gun to our head,” he said, as ThePrint reported.

The Diwali Deadline

India and the United Kingdom opened talks on a free trade agreement in January 2022. On April 22, 2022, during a visit to India, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he wanted the deal done by Diwali that year. On October 14, 2022, Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch said: “We are no longer working to the Diwali deadline.”

The negotiations concluded on May 6, 2025. Piyush Goyal and the British business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, signed the agreement at Chequers on July 24, 2025. Dawn described “three years of stop-start negotiations.”

Five Percent

The Arthashastra, the ancient treatise on statecraft attributed to Kautilya, limits a merchant’s margin. In R. Shamasastry’s English translation: “The Superintendent of Commerce shall fix a profit of five per cent over and above the fixed price of local commodities, and ten per cent on foreign produce.”