Over the past week, I’ve chronicled my investigative research on starvation in India – a project I’ve been working on with a colleague from the Centre for Equity Studies, a New Delhi think tank. We’ve told stories of people who were forced to eat poisoned roots to stay alive; a family that suffered the deaths of members from three different generations in a span of 24 hours; a woman faced with...

-The Business Standard About 240 million more people in Asia, or 6.5 per cent of the population, could have been lifted out of poverty, had inequality not widened over the past 20 years, roughly the era coinciding with economic reforms in India, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) said in a report released on Wednesday. “Asia’s rapid growth is leaving millions behind, causing a widening gap between the rich and the poor that...

Officials may pocket the wage increases, but the wage level in MGNREGA seems just enough to induce workers to turn up. This year marks the sixth anniversary of the implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), India's landmark right-to-work programme. The Act guarantees 100 days of paid employment to every rural household in India (up to 850 million people), regardless of eligibility criteria, and establishes the government's...

-The Economic Times Repressed, unrevised retail prices by fiat have led to rising diesel consumption nationwide, thoroughly misallocating resources and recklessly fretting away scarce budgetary funds in the bargain. The government needs to promptly decontrol diesel prices and put paid to open-ended oil consumption subsidies, as it has rightly proposed to in the Union Budget.  Further dither and non-decision would wreak havoc in government finances and hook the fiscal deficit figure over...

-The Hindu   “Heart of policy is that government believes people should pay tax somewhere” Even as Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee faces flak from corporates at home and abroad on his budget proposal to tax Vodafone-type deals through retrospective amendment, World Bank president Robert Zoellick sought to side with the government saying India wanted the company to pay tax at some place. He also reasoned that investors must give some time to the government...