A new report on India's housing sector confirms with facts and figures what has been suspected all along: that despite growing demand for affordable housing, supply side responses have been weak and sluggish. This means even though the housing sector can directly impact employment and income generation, and has multiple forward and backward linkages with various industries, it needs innovative ideas, pro-poor thinking and policy stimulus. (See link below for...

-Frontline DAVID SANDERS, Professor Emeritus and founding Director of the School of Public Health at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in South Africa, is a specialist paediatrician with postgraduate qualifications in public health. One of the founders of the global public health movement, he has over 30 years' experience in health policy and programme development in Zimbabwe and South Africa, having advised governments as well as organisations such as...

-IndiaResists.com The ongoing debate between two stalwart economists, Amartya Sen and Jagdish Bhagwati, must be joined by those who understand contemporary realities and challenges in terms altogether different from those of mainstream economists. In a recent (July 27) article in Times of India, Bhagwati's co-author Arvind Panagariya characterizes the differences between the two in the following terms. Sen favours education and health measures as being the first steps to tackle poverty...

-The Hindu Business Line From maker of versions of drugs, India's pharmaceutical industry has turned a top innovator Twenty years ago, Ranbaxy was a home-spun drug-maker. The Indian Patents Act allowed companies to make chemically-similar versions of innovative drugs. Visionaries in the pharmaceutical sector, like Parvinder Singh (Ranbaxy's key architect and member of its promoter family) and Anji Reddy (founder of Dr Reddy's Laboratories), were alive. And the pharmaceutical industry did not have...

-The Economist Government borrowing generates inflation, widens the external deficit and crowds out much-needed investment. Can India now overcome its debt addiction? INDIA has grappled with its public finances for long enough. When presenting its first budget after independence in 1947, the finance minister of the day insisted that the country was not living beyond its means. Yet every budget since has failed to produce a surplus. India borrows more heavily...