-The Wall Street Journal These days, Indian policymakers are debating how to create a vast new food entitlement program. There is talk of poor households struggling to cope with high food prices and malnourishment among their children. What you don’t hear much about, however, is the most tragic and outrageous consequence of India’s failure to feed its people adequately: starvation deaths. India is a nation that prides itself on having been self-sufficient in...

Each time 25 year old Salma takes her one year old son Zubair to the Batla Clinic (a private clinic in Delhi) for a shot of the DPT, the cost of transportation and the vaccine adds up to approximately Rs.500.   When it is time for Zubair to take the next immunization dose, Salma may find that the expenses have entirely spiraled out of her reach. New vaccines and expensive brands of baby...

Experts agree that the economic and environmental costs of interlinking India's rivers far outweigh its projected benefits. Some people believe it is the one-stop solution to prevent floods and droughts, reduce water scarcity, raise irrigation potential and increase foodgrain production in the country. But others say it is just another grandiose scheme involving huge costs and leading to long-term ecological consequences. The contentious idea of interlinking India's rivers has come...

Ramaswamy R. Iyer, former Secretary, Union Ministry of Water Resources, has been a consistent critic of the idea of interlinking rivers (ILR). In this interview, he shares his concerns about the Supreme Court's judgment directing the government to implement the project, and explains why it is deeply flawed. Excerpts In your article in “The Hindu”, you have claimed that the government's stand on the project is ambiguous. The amicus curiae has,...

Two years after the ambitious Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 came into being, 95.2 per cent of schools are not yet compliant with the complete set of RTE infrastructure indicators, a civil society survey nationwide shows. And a shockingly high percentage, 93, of teacher candidates failed in the National Teacher Eligibility Test conducted by the Central Board of Secondary Education in 2010-11. In 2009-10, the failure...