Renewable energy sources are attractive but in a sense, powerless. Maybe, someday we'll all live in houses with photovoltaic roof tiles but in the real world, a 1GW of solar plant will require 60 square miles of solar panels. When the demand increases, you can fire up more coal, but how will you cause the wind to blow and the sun to shine 24x7? The earth is already so disabled...

In a spate of recent cases in Punjab, information seekers are being turned away by public institutions on the ground that they are not covered under the RTI Act, and are not obliged to share information about their functioning. This despite the fact that almost all these institutions have received financial aid from the state government.   In nearly all such cases, the information seekers had to knock the doors of Information...

-The Times of India Fears that policy paralysis will continue after the Congress party's poor show in the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections unnerved investors, and the sensex lost 190 points on Tuesday to end the day at 17173, its worst close in six weeks. The trepidation in the markets also affected shares of a few Anil Ambani-promoted Reliance Group companies, even though they were actually expected to gain because of the...

India’s decision-makers seem to find it difficult to see that there are children in the country. Being unable to see them, they are unable to perceive that they are hungry. In an age when we are able to use euphemisms like ‘under-nutrition’, this is perhaps not surprising. But it is disgraceful none the less.   This country has a large population of children. Fortyone per cent of its total numbers. The national...

-Live Mint High on hype, the budget speech of the Union finance minister today is merely a statement of account. As India’s economy diversifies—with the private sector playing an increasingly important role—this annual feature has assumed much lower salience. Not only have fiscal policies lost the space they enjoyed in earlier years, even major policy announcements are restricted to being mere statements of account. Examples from other arenas include “activism” on...