-Down to Earth Biometric-based unique identity or Aadhaar is leading to huge problems for people working for the rural employment guarantee scheme and for others receiving welfare benefits. Not only have enrolments been done shoddily but the experience of the pilot projects shows that it is almost impossible to authenticate the work-hardened fingerprints of the poor, find Latha Jishnu and Jyotika Sood. Besides, there is the overwhelming issue of deficient online...

As children, we were taught to say before our meals, “Annadaata sukhi bhava.” It was a thanksgiving to God for sending the farmer to make food for us and may God bless him. Today, the farmer is helpless. He has no God to go to. Farmer suicides are the tip of the iceberg. The future of agriculture, or lack of it, is staring us in the face. Periodical doles like loan waivers...

-The Economic Times The April 28, 2012, issue of The Economist has a story on India's solar power and mentions Charanka village in Patan district, Gujarat. Solar energy can be converted into electricity, using photovoltaics, or can be converted into heat. (There are other technologies too, but those aren't important yet.) So far, solar thermal, or heating, in India has essentially meant solar cookers and water heaters, though it needn't stay that...

-IANS India's ambitious national solar programme has catalysed rapid growth in the solar market driving solar energy prices low and demonstrating how government policy can stimulate clean energy markets, according to a new report. In only two years, competitive bidding under India's National Solar Mission drove prices for grid-connected solar energy to nearly the price of electricity from fossil fuels, said the report released here Wednesday by the Natural Resources Defence...

There is evidence to show that growth is slowly becoming inclusive. But for the quality of life to improve, incomes must be complemented by infrastructure. For close to at least five years now inclusive growth has had a central place in the official discourse on the economy. The UPA II has itself worn its self-proclaimed success in delivering an inclusive growth as a badge of its effectiveness, not to mention its...