A good monsoon forecast strengthens prospects for India to cut sugar imports, free up grain exports and buy more Gold as rains boost supplies in the world’s leading consumer of most farm commodities. Annual monsoon rains from June to September are key to firing up growth and farm output and limiting inflation in India, which ranks among the world’s top producers and consumers of sugar, wheat, rice and edible oils and...

Around two decades ago, Lawrence Summers, then World Bank chief economist, outraged many when he argued in an internal memo that the economic logic behind dumping toxic waste in low-wage countries was “impeccable”. His rationale: less developed countries are “under-polluted” and that “foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality” would be lesser in countries with lower wages. Cut to now and the thing to ask is: does India too believe...

Long-term greedy is a term that a Goldman Sachs partner made famous, by way of self-definition . It is as good a description as any of making profits in a sustainable fashion. Lafarge displayed short-term greed when it violated the law in obtaining forest clearance for a limestone mining project in Meghalaya’s Khasi hills, to supply raw material for its own cement plant in neighbouring Bangladesh. It described the mining...

INSIDE his hovel of branches and rags, a grizzled pauper called Badshah Kale keeps a precious object. It is a note, scrawled by a policeman and framed by Mr Kale, proclaiming that he “is not a thief”. For members of his Pardhi tribe, who are among some 60m Indians considered criminal by tradition, this is treasure. Squatting beside Mr Kale, on a turd-strewn wasteland outside Ashti, a village in India’s western...

Democracy and free market have fused into single predatory organism: Arundhati Roy  MoUs with transnational firms resulted in tribals moving out of their lands: Arundhati Roy The problem of market externality poses systemic risks: Chomsky “What happens, now that democracy and the free market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximising profit,” asked author Arundhati Roy at a...