-Mid Day   India shines in its malls but slips badly when it comes to ensuring the well- being of its millions India may well be the world's fastest growing "free market"economy, but it is no competition to its neighbours when it comes to the social wellbeing of her people. A comparison with the neighbouring nations shows that besides Pakistan, all others like Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and China are far better off in...

-AP India has shut down three aid organizations it says were diverting foreign funds toward rallying protests against a Russian-built nuclear plant in the south, but one group on Saturday denied any involvement in the protests while another said its efforts were entirely homegrown.  Activists opposed to an expansion of India's atomic energy portfolio argue that Japan's Fukushima nuclear disaster caused by a massive earthquake and tsunami last March showed that such...

Muhammad Yunus, the economist who founded Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank, visited Mumbai recently where he spoke to India Ink about his vision of “social businesses,” his forced departure from Grameen and the recent controversies that have dogged micro-finance in India and elsewhere. An edited, condensed version of the interview follows: Q. The microfinance industry has gone through an existential crisis in the last few years. Why did the industry fall from grace? A. See,...

Dr Abhijit Sen is Member, Planning Commission of India. He is a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Cambridge (currently on leave as Professor of Economics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University) and has also taught at the Universities of Sussex, Oxford and Cambridge. Besides serving various think tanks in the states and at the centre, Dr Sen has been a consultant with UNDP, ILO, FAO and various other multilateral...

The huge expenditure on the food bill, with the attendant leakages, could well make fiscal recovery impossible In the first part of this article, we have estimated the actual cost of implementing the food security bill in its current form. In this part, we now examine the fiscal sustainability of the same. The current state of the revenue and expenditure trends of the Central government (refer table) show that while revenue...