The government believes it is more important to be seen to be doing things than to be doing them well. The proposed food security legislation is another example of this tendency. The legislation exemplifies the self-defeating obduracy of bureaucratic modes of thinking. But the debate around it also exemplifies a failure of intellectual argument in India. Our debates often have this character. First, we spend a lot more time arguing...

Global experience in retail trading by MNCs does not tally with the presumptions on which the UPA government's FDI policy is based. IN the course of the debate on the need to permit foreign direct investment in retail in India, two arguments have been advanced often. The first argument is that large organised retail is good for not just consumers, who would benefit from lower prices owing to cost efficiencies...

The FDI in retail debate has apparently fully traversed the realm of reason and for it seems to have degenerated into name-calling. I had intimation of this when a diplomat who meets me from time to time asked me if I was being put up, for a price, by Indian corporate interests to stymie the entry of the big western firms like Wal-Mart and Carrefour? I can well imagine the...

Five States did manage a significant decline in the average number of farm suicides between 2003 and 2010. However, more States have reported increases over the same period. The television story was genuine and sensitive. At least 90 farmers, it said, had committed suicide in two months in Andhra Pradesh. These were cotton growers. Actually, last year, Andhra farmers killed themselves at the rate of 210 each month on average, according...

The failure of timely intervention by the state government as regards the woes of cotton growers of Vidarbha seems to have only added to the agrarian crisis. The suicide by six more cotton growers of the region in the last 72 hours paints a grim picture of the correlation between the government’s inaction and distressed farmers driven to take the extreme step.   Reports reaching here on Thursday said that among the...