Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Turn of the Tortoise
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Indian
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Standard * https://www.ft.com/content/5fd81f2a-8c74-11e5-8be4-3506bf20cc2b * https://global.oup.com/academic/product/turn-of-the-tortoise-9780190603014?cc=us&lang=en& * http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/X4DcksEDmRA5PRfgl5LNDI/Book-Review-The-Turn-of-the-Tortoise-by-TN-Ninan.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2016245206
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2016245206
HEADING: Ninan, T. N.
000 00582nz a2200181n 450
001 10149464
005 20160503040208.0
008 160503n| azannaabn |n aaa
010 __ |a n 2016245206
040 __ |a DLC |b eng |c DLC |e rda
100 1_ |a Ninan, T. N.
370 __ |c India
372 __ |a Journalism, Commercial |2 lcsh
373 __ |a India Today Group |2 naf
374 __ |a Journalists |2 lcsh
375 __ |a male
377 __ |a eng
670 __ |a The turn of the tortoise, 2015: |b title page (T.N. Ninan) jacket (business journalism in India; India Today, the Economic Times, Business World, Business Standard)
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:University of Madras, M.A., 1972.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Business Standard Ltd., editor, 1993-2009, chairman and editorial director, 2010-; formerly editor of Economic Times, Business World, and India Today.
Has also been president of the Editors Guild of India, chairman of the Media Committee of the Confederation of Indian Industry, chairman of the Society for Environmental Communication. Has served on the Board of the Shri Ram School and is a member of the Indo-German Consultative Group and trustee of Aspen Institute India.
AWARDS:B.D. Goenka Award for excellence in journalism; Nehru Fellowship, Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, 2013 and 2014.
WRITINGS
Has written articles for Business Standard, an Indian English-language daily newspaper.
SIDELIGHTS
T.N. Ninan earned a master’s degree in economics from the University of Madras and went on to a long career as editor and publisher of various business magazines, among them, Economic Times, Business World, and India Today. In 1993 he became editor at Business Standard Ltd., moving on to the position of chairman and editorial director in 2010. His work in journalism earned him a B.D. Goenka Award for excellence.
Ninan’s first book is Turn of the Tortoise: The Challenge and Promise of India’s Future. In this book, he looks at the underpinnings of India as a country long considered to be—along with China—a growing and evolving economic world power. On one hand, India is enormous in size and population, with potential in terms of trade. On the other hand, the country is extremely poor and suffers from government corruption and dysfunction. Even so, India has made a strong showing in the services industry, garnering it the position of seventh-largest world economic power.
Turn of the Tortoise describes India as the “poorest large national economy in the world, with the lowest per capita income among the forty economies that account for ninety percent of world GDP”—a situation that will change only very slowly. This scenario, according to Ninan, makes India a “country full of potential.” As Ninan puts it, “India’s is very much the tortoise story in the fable—a story starter coming good over a time.”
A Publishers Weekly critic termed Ninan’s book an “exceptionally knowledgeable and realistic assessment of India today.” A reviewer writing online at Live Mint, commented that Ninan “painstakingly examines the problems that bedevil India’s economy: an underperforming state, rising cronyism, growing graft, hobbled manufacturing, populist politics and the prickly debate over growth or environment.” The reviewer went on to describe Ninan as a “perceptive analyst who also writes lucidly” and observed that “that alone makes this book an engaging read for anyone interested in India’s present and future.” Writing at Financial Times Online, Victor Mallet noted that Ninan is “more of a stolid realist than a nationalistic cheerleader.” As Ninan describes it, “India plods and stumbles onwards, propelled by the sheer size of a domestic market of 1.3bn people and the need to catch up with nimbler rivals.” The conditions that can help move India forward are 1) growth of the middle class, 2) less governmental control of the economy, and 3) a shift in governmental power from New Delhi to state capitals. The critic concluded that Ninan’s argument suggests: “The Indian tortoise is moving faster up the track than its rivals. But it is a long way from the finish line, and it is still a tortoise.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, October 10, 2016, review of Turn of the Tortoise: The Challenge and Promise of India’s Future, p. 68.
ONLINE
Financial Times Online, https://www.ft.com (January 3, 2016), Victor Mallet, review of The Turn of the Tortoise.
Live Mint, http://www.livemint.com (December 2, 2015), review of The Turn of the Tortoise.*
T. N. NINAN
Mumbai, India
Check Speaker Availability
Chairman and Editorial Director of Business Standard Ltd
Former Editor of the Economic Times & India Today
One of India’s most respected economic editors
Videos about T. N. Ninan VIDEOS
Biography of T. N. Ninan BIO
T. N. Ninan is Chairman and Editorial Director of Business Standard Ltd, publisher of India’s second largest business daily. During a quarter century at the helm of different publications, he has been the editor of Business Standard, (where he was also the publisher from 1996), the Economic Times and Business World, bringing about radical change and achieving rapid growth in all of them during his stewardship. He was also the executive editor at India Today.
From January 2010, Mr Ninan has moved into non-executive roles, while continuing to be a television commentator on economic and business issues. Mr Ninan has served as chairman or member of the governing boards of a number of non-profit bodies and trusts, in the fields of media, environment, education and public affairs.
Mr Ninan is one of the India’s most respected economic editors. His sharp and incisive commentaries on the Budget are a much-awaited feature of the annual business calendar. His weekly column “Weekend Ruminations” is widely read among the business community, senior economists and economic bureaucrats alike.
Mr Ninan has received a number of awards for his exceptional work, including the B.D.Goenka award for excellence in journalism, and he regularly shares his views on current issues on national television. The Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund has awarded him a Nehru Fellowship for 2013 and 2014.
Book T. N. Ninan as keynote speaker at your next event or conference.
Our Comment
"Mr Ninan is an institution in the world of Indian business and economic commentary. A rigorous debater, his keen intellect cuts straight to the heart the issues at stake in any discussion."
TN Ninan
Editorial Director, Business Standard Ltd, India
T. N. Ninan is the Chairman of Business Standard Ltd. During a quarter century at the helm of different publications, he has been the editor of Business Standard (where he was also the publisher from 1996), the Economic Times and Business World, bringing about radical change and achieving rapid growth in all of them during his stewardship. He was also the executive editor at India Today. From January 2010, Mr. Ninan has moved into non-executive roles. He has been President of the Editors Guild of India, Chairman of the Media Committee of the Confederation of Indian Industry, Chairman of the Society for Environmental Communication (which publishes ‘Down to Earth’ magazine), and a member of the Board of Trade. He has served on the Board of the Shri Ram School, and is a member of the Indo-German Consultative Group as well as a Trustee of Aspen Institute India. Mr. Ninan is a recipient of awards, including the B. D. Goenka award for excellence in journalism. The Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund has awarded him a Nehru Fellowship for 2013 and 2014. Mr Ninan received his MA in Economics from the University of Madras in 1972.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Business Standard
Business Standard logo.jpg
Business Standard cover 03-28-10.jpg
Type Daily newspaper
Format Broadsheet
Owner(s) Kotak Mahindra Bank
Founder(s) ABP Group
Publisher Business Standard Ltd
Founded 26 March 1975
Language English
Hindi
Headquarters Nehru House
4, Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg
New Delhi 110002
Circulation 217,000
OCLC number 496280002
Website www.business-standard.com
hindi.business-standard.com
Business Standard is an Indian English-language daily newspaper published by Business Standard Ltd (BSL) in two languages, English and Hindi. Founded in 1975, the newspaper primarily covers India and international business, and financial news and issues. The main English-language edition comes from 12 regional centres,[1] New Delhi, Kolkata, Bangalore, Coimbatore, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Chandigarh, Pune, Lucknow, Raipur, Bhubaneswar, and Kochi—and reaches readers in over 1,000 towns and cities across India.[2]
Contents [hide]
1 Personnel
2 Distribution and format
2.1 Electronic
3 References
4 External links
Personnel[edit]
T. N. Ninan was editor from 1993 to 2009, when he took up the editorship of The Economic Times. In January 2010, Ninan became chairman and editorial director of BSL and was succeeded as editor of Business Standard by Dr Sanjaya Baru. He was the media advisor to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Veteran journalist and editor Ashok K Bhattacharya took charge of the paper after Baru quit to join a UK based think tank in 2011.[3] The paper is India's second largest business daily and employs more than 200 business journalists, including Nitin Sethi[4] and Shyamal Majumdar.[5]
Business Standard has regular columnists like, Bimal Jalan, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India; Subir Gokarn former Deputy Governor of Reserve Bank of India; Shankar Acharya, former chief economic advisor to the Government of India; Deepak Lal, professor of economics, UCLA; Suman Bery, director-general, National Council of Applied Economic Research; Abheek Barua, chief economist of HDFC Bank; Nitin Desai, former chief economic advisor and former under-secretary general at the United Nations; Surjit Bhalla, chairman of OXUS; Arvind Subramanian, professor at the Peterson Institute for International Economics; M. Govinda Rao, director of National Institute of Public Finance and Policy; AV Rajwade, foreign exchange consultant; and Arvind Singhal, chairman, Technopak Advisors.
Distribution and format[edit]
Business Standard sells 217,000 copies daily (English and Hindi included).
ACNielsen's survey of the Upper middle class and Rich Market in India places Business Standard next to The Economic Times in total readership.
The paper has pioneered the ranking of the wealthiest Indians (the Billionaire Club) and provides an auto-mobile magazine as a free monthly supplement.
In 2006, BSL began to produce a Sunday edition that is now published in four centres.
The Hindi edition was launched in February 2008 from seven centres stretching from Mumbai in the west, running across the Hindi Belt, and to Kolkata in the east.
BSL also publishes various periodicals, including BS Motoring,[6] Indian Management and the Asian Management Review.
Electronic[edit]
The newspaper's website allows visitors to access the Business Standard e-paper, with a choice of editions. The Business Standard website receives 11.5 million page views and has 2 million unique users per month, the highest for any "stand alone" newspaper website in India.[7]
In January 2010, it launched SmartInvestor,[8] an information-cum-trading website for those interested in stock market (The website appears to be in beta phase 6 years after its launch as can be seen on its homepage).
As of June 2016, Business Standard has become first Indian newspaper with high subscription to limit access to its articles. It has also started blocking access to users who use Adblocker tool on similar lines as to what Times of India,[9] does for its online articles. The 'Opinion' pieces which are basically editorials are now locked for open access and can be seen as a locked key symbol[10] on the webpage. These articles are now accessible only using a Business Standard monthly subscription ,[11] which is available as a standalone subscription or in conjunction with WSJ where users get discounted access to WSJ. The details of this deal between two news websites are not publicly known.
Turn of the Tortoise: The Challenge and Promise of India's
Future
Publishers Weekly.
263.41 (Oct. 10, 2016): p68.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Turn of the Tortoise: The Challenge and Promise of India's Future
T.N. Ninan. Oxford Univ., $34.95 (280p) ISBN 978-0-19-060301-4
India, frequently invoked alongside China as an emerging economic superpower, is revealed as a land of contradictions by Ninan, former editor
of two leading Indian business publications, the Business Standard and the Economic Times. As he explains, India's sheer size and population
make it a valuable market and trading power, yet its poverty--average per capita income was $3,372 in 2009--2010--and dysfunctional public
sector are significant hindrances to growth. Unlike China, which has nimbly transformed itself into a global manufacturer, India's strength
currently lies in services, attributable more to low wages and Indians' facility with the English language than competitiveness or efficiency. Ninan
laments that India's tradition of government control of industry, corruption, and cronyism have allowed incompetent, not to mention irrational,
business practices to flourish, forestalling the emergence of a vibrant private sector. Even so, India has already surpassed three developed
countries--Canada, Italy, and Spain--to become the world's seventh largest economy. Ninan leaves readers with a note of optimism, predicting that
slow and steady progress will cement India's notable achievements. He has crafted an exceptionally knowledgeable and realistic assessment of
India today. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Turn of the Tortoise: The Challenge and Promise of India's Future." Publishers Weekly, 10 Oct. 2016, p. 68. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466616199&it=r&asid=02688cf92fe7d0dcbf5b16bceac70350. Accessed 12 June
2017.
6/12/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1497295773436 2/2
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466616199
Book Review: ‘The Turn of the Tortoise’ by TN Ninan
The story of India and its growth is one of hits and misses, according to this lucidly written book
Enter your email
GoSubscribe to our newsletter.
Soutik Biswas
In India, 43% students are in private schools. Photo: Hemant Mishra/Mint
In India, 43% students are in private schools. Photo: Hemant Mishra/Mint
India’s economy usually attracts metaphors involving animals. So it has been variously called a slumbering elephant, caged tiger, sleeping dragon. The lion is the mascot of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Make in India programme. Now journalist T.N. Ninan introduces a reptile as a metaphor: the tortoise.
Ninan is an optimist. But for over 300 pages, he painstakingly examines the problems that bedevil India’s economy: an underperforming state, rising cronyism, growing graft, hobbled manufacturing, populist politics and the prickly debate over growth or environment. Ninan is a perceptive analyst who also writes lucidly, and that alone makes this book an engaging read for anyone interested in India’s present and future.
“India’s is very much the tortoise story in the fable—a story starter coming good over a time,” writes Ninan. He is neither a triumphalist, nor a naysayer. But some of the facts speak for themselves. India is already the world’s seventh largest economy. It is a $2.3 trillion (Rs.152.67 trillion) market growing at 7% annually. Even an annual growth of more than 6% would help catapult India to become the world’s third largest economy, some years before 2040. In the coming five years it is projected to be the third largest contributor to world growth after China and the US.
The Turn of the Tortoise: Penguin, 354 pages, Rs699
Click here for enlarge
But the tortoise walk is fraught with age-old problems. For one, India’s size, believes Ninan, has led its policy makers into confusion about objectives. It was not enough, for example, to set up a big solar power generating capacity, but also to ensure that the solar cells and panels were made in India, even if it meant higher costs. “If multiple objectives are pursued simultaneously, compromises have to be made on the main objectives—mathematically, it is impossible to maximize more than one function.” The result, as Ninan says, is a country of bizarre contrasts—it can’t make a decent razor blade or fountain pen, even as it builds atomic power stations and sends rockets into space.
Then there are price distortions—industries made unviable by artificial prices. Rigid labour markets stifle job creation. Radical reforms happen only when there is a sense of crisis. “The reality in India is that there is no sense of crisis or of an urgent need for change, especially after growth rates were upped.”
So it is difficult to determine what reforms mean to most people. “What India does not have is reform flowing from political conviction, such as when a political leader campaigns and creates the climate for change,” writes Ninan. So India opts for easy choices: relatively painless solutions—like the application of technology to deliver government services faster, better and cheaper.
Then there’s the worrying retreat of the state in sectors where the state is needed the most. Already 43% of India’s schoolchildren go to private schools. By 2025, 60% would be going to private schools. This is unprecedented: no country has seen public education dwarfed by private education. Then, 60% of India’s hospital beds are privately owned. The quality of private education and healthcare may be better, but imposes exorbitant costs.
India’s liabilities can also turn out to be the country’s strength. Size, Ninan believes, will shape India’s destiny. Even if only a third of Indians enjoy discretionary spending power, its middle class would be larger than the population of all countries other than China. India’s market for cars is the world’s sixth largest already, although less than 5% of households owned cars in 2011. All this could also easily lead to the most unequal society in the world, riven by social tensions and unrest.
Ninan addresses other important questions as well. Will India’s constitutional liberalism give way to less than liberal democracy? India has a long tradition with bans when it comes to uncomfortable books and films, and intolerance is on the rise everywhere. “Some of the points of conflict are the result of social churn that is linked to modernization. Traditional hierarchies, boundaries and authority get challenged in a freewheeling world where more women go to work, where youngsters mingle without concern for caste or community, and where old identities get fused into new ones that might seem deracinated,” writes Ninan. He is also reassured by the fact that new and liberating technologies help foster more freedom. “At the same time, one must not rule out the danger of complicit majorities operating to impose constraints on different minorities.”
“The reassuring facts in a broadly hopeful scenario are that the directions of change are overwhelmingly positive, and that the system as a whole has a bedrock of stability that is not affected by the surface churn,” Ninan writes. What is in grave doubt is the quality of growth—foul air, mediocre teachers, weak regulation, blighted cities, appalling criminal-justice system, strained social relations. That is really the big challenge for the tortoise on a brisk trot.
Please follow link - unable to copy.
BEN: Sketchwriter copied.
JANUARY 3, 2016 by: Review by Victor Mallet
At the start of 2016, the numbers suggest it really is the turn of the Indian tortoise to race ahead. With annual gross domestic product growth of 7.4 per cent in the third quarter, India is expanding faster than China or any large economy and is sparkling when compared with recession-hit emerging markets such as Brazil.
TN Ninan is, however, more of a stolid realist than a nationalistic cheerleader for India or for Narendra Modi, its prime minister.
Ninan, chairman and former editor of the Business Standard newspaper, implies in this survey of India’s economy since the 1991 reforms that its moment of glory comes almost by default. While others have fallen by the wayside, India plods and stumbles onwards, propelled by the sheer size of a domestic market of 1.3bn people and the need to catch up with nimbler rivals. “India is the world’s last great business frontier,” he writes.
India, as Ninan says, is compared unfavourably with China and other Asian successes to the east rather than with struggling African economies to the west. And India is a nuclear power that has sent a satellite to Mars. But, yes, India’s transport infrastructure is bad; governments have crippled industry over the years with laughably counterproductive policies (including penalising large companies and so ensuring that China took charge of every internationally traded sector from garments to white goods); basic state education and healthcare are shockingly poor; and corrupt politicians and obstructive bureaucrats are many and powerful.
“Put it all together, and the system is manifestly dysfunctional,” says Ninan, noting that in 2014 India’s average per capita income was lower than those of Laos, Zambia and Sudan.
The two big Indian failures he identifies are in government (which can be fixed, albeit with difficulty) and in manufacturing (which can also be fixed, but not in a way that will recreate the mass employment of industrial revolutions before the robotic age).
Successive Indian governments are blamed, among other things, for focusing on tertiary rather than basic education, for creating an unwieldy welfare state (among the handouts in Tamil Nadu are rice, food mixers, goats, laptops, free electricity for weavers and cash and gold for those getting married), and for slow justice and bad labour laws.
Officially there are 30m Indians in formal employment, just 6 per cent of the total workforce, and most of them are state employees — although the statistics are contradicted by other data. India is indeed what Harvard professor Lant Pritchett called a “flailing state”, with officials unable to implement even the sensible policies handed down from the top.
In manufacturing, Mr Modi has launched a “Make in India” programme to attract investment and integrate the country’s factories into global supply chains dominated by east Asia. In theory, wages are attractively low for investors, but Mr Modi is faced with an awful legacy.
India finally freed product markets in the 1990s from the Kafkaesque rules that had governed them, but has proved unable to liberalise the key factors of production — labour and land.
“Indeed,” writes Ninan, “most producers looking for alternatives to China are not looking at India. Its rigid labour laws remain a handicap, its workers are not always as productive, the infrastructure is deficient, and dealing with the authorities is a nightmare. Almost all countries in east Asia offer easier working environments.” Ouch.
Ninan lays out three “mega trends” that will shape India’s future: a surge in the size of the middle class; the continued but unwilling retreat of the state from the economy (43 per cent of schoolchildren go to private schools); and a shift in political power from New Delhi to state capitals.
He laments the lack of any constituency among politicians for free markets or radical reform. The best he can say — echoing Jawaharlal Nehru’s speech at independence in 1947 — is that life for Indians will improve at an acceptable speed “not wholly, but very substantially”. For the time being, the Indian tortoise is moving faster up the track than its rivals. But it is a long way from the finish line, and it is still a tortoise.
The writer is the FT’s south Asia bureau chief
The Turn of the Tortoise: The Challenge and Promise of India’s Future, by TN Ninan, Allen Lane/Penguin India, Rs699
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2017. All rights reserved. You may share using our article tools. Please don't copy articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.