Andy Mukherjee

After a tightly centralized vaccination drive that has delivered the required two shots to less than 2% of the population, India is opening up its inoculation strategy in the middle of a raging pandemic. Can the new approach flatten the curve? Expanding the campaign to all adults below 45…

It’s fun to watch young children learn to handle cash by buying an ice cream and giving us back the change. But there will be nothing adorable about being surrounded by machines that need equally patient hand-holding when it comes to using money, like making sure our refrigerator stocks up the…

Nationalistic pride may swell chests, but to fill lungs you need air. Someone should tell that to the Indian government. The country that boasted of being the world’s pharmacy in March discovers a month later that not only are “Made in India” vaccines in short supply, but also that it didn’t…

In the annals of 21st century capitalism, Covid-19 will go down as a pressure cooker. The pandemic has put enormous strains on livelihoods, individual well-being, healthcare systems, the viability of firms and the stability of public finances. But a byproduct of this stress is that when it’s…

The idea that much of today’s cash use will shift to digital tokens is neither faddish nor outlandish, as long as you don’t start equating the future of money with Bitcoin. Sure, governments will borrow some elements of the distributed ledger technology behind private cryptocurrencies, but they…

India’s central bank is opening its balance sheet to the public. Retail investors will have online access to the government bond market via investment accounts with the Reserve Bank. As the government’s investment bank, the RBI manages institutional buying and selling in gilt securities…

India’s federal budget Monday will be a much tougher balancing act than New Delhi’s regular annual fiscal trapeze. For one thing, the pandemic has upset business-as-usual calculations of how much to spend, on what, and how to finance it. For another, an impatience to make up for lost time has to be…

Farmers’ protests are threatening to snowball into the biggest political crisis of Narendra Modi’s tenure. To give in to demands and scrap the laws would be an uncharacteristic admission of defeat for India’s strongman prime minister, who promised they would transform agriculture. But letting…