-The Economic Times   Shibu Joseph ( Why I am Quitting my Job, ET, March 29) suggests, tongue-in-cheek, that he should quit the drudgery of corporate life and, instead, enjoy the "freebies" given to the aam aadmi, like the right to work under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA).  I am not going to write on behalf of the crores of people who work in this programme, because I am...

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...

“Entire public hearing was farce and makes mockery of public hearing process” In a significant decision the National Green Tribunal (NGT) on Friday set aside the Environmental Clearance (EC) granted to the 4 MTPA Coal Mining Project of Jindal Steel and Power Ltd (JSPL) and 4 MTPA Coal Washery at Gare in Raigarh district of Chhattisgarh on grounds of faulty public hearing. The company had been granted environmental clearance in May 2009....

Arundhati has got it all wrong—the facts speak out against her romantic notions of the tribals’ fight Nirad C. Chaudhary wrote in The Continent of Circe that India’s tribals were mainly found in hill forests. This was because, he reasoned, they had been chased there by the invading Aryans, who displaced them from their river plains. In an essay published in this magazine (Capitalism: A Ghost Story, March 26), Arundhati Roy...

-The Telegraph The Centre has clarified that none of the provisions in the Right to Education Act (RTE) will apply to unaided minority institutes, an exemption that can have several implications for some of the most reputable schools in Calcutta. The exemption means unaided minority schools, if they choose to, can reconsider the mandatory auto-promotion policy till Class VIII and explore ways of disciplining students without inflicting physical pain. Although the central clarification...