India has launched its first high-tech census. Citizens will be photographed and will give 10 fingerprints each. The resultant database will be used to issue identity cards, and later smart cards, to all.  All Indians will welcome high-tech smart cards. Yet the technological lead has been taken not by the census commissioner but, astonishingly, by Bihar. This state has just completed a pilot project for smart cards in Patna district,...

The Planning Commission has offered an objective assessment of the unsatisfactory situation as far as Indian agriculture is concerned in its mid-term appraisal of the 11th Five-Year Plan. The commission has done well to remind us that the farm sector is still subject to strangulating controls that dissuade private investment in key areas, including logistics and storage. The government’s agricultural pricing policies, which have rendered minimum support prices (MSPs) the...

The National Advisory Council is back with Congress chief Sonia Gandhi at its head, promising to give a strong fillip to the UPA government's social sector agenda that is at the heart of the party's political strategy to consolidate its 'aam admi' base. The revival of the NAC, that had folded up following Sonia's resignation after the office-of-profit controversy, has been on the cards since the Supreme Court gave its...

Kaushik Basu, the current Chief Economic Adviser to the Ministry of Finance, had a 15-year-long stint as Professor of Economics at Cornell University. The Padma Bhushan awardee has been working closely with the Finance Ministry and the Prime Minister to chart the country’s future growth path. He spoke to MANAV CHOPRA about the need for better monitoring to ensure growth doesn’t happen at the expense of social justice. Excerpts: A common...

In a thrust to provide sustained support to life-saving innovations in India and around the world, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is placing new emphasis on innovations that effect social and cultural change to bring down the unacceptably high death rates for children under five years of age in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. “A lot of times,” Melinda French Gates, wife of Microsoft founder Bill Gates and co-founder of...