-The Economist West Bengal’s populist chief minister is doing badly. Yet she typifies shifts in power in India BUYER’S remorse is common enough in the dusty markets of Kolkata, a delightful if crumbling great city, once known as Calcutta and still capital of the state of West Bengal. Those who buy cheap plastic goods or plaster-of-Paris busts of Rabindranath Tagore, Bengal’s cultural hero, may come to regret their haste. Likewise, many who...

The country is clearly shaping its legislation to promote access to medicines by fostering generic production. INDIA'S approach to the revision of its Patents Act in 2005 is a clear example of a country shaping its legislation to promote access to medicines by fostering generic production. Although World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules made it mandatory for India to put in place a patent regime for medicines by 2005, nothing obliges...

The Supreme Court's recent mandate that private unaided non-minority schools should reserve 25 per cent of seats for underprivileged children is being hailed as a landmark ruling. The spirit of the decision is indeed laudable as it reflects the egalitarian ethos of the Right to Education (RTE) Act. Thus, as private schools open their doors to children from marginalised sections of society, the government pats itself on the back for...

-The Telegraph The manner in which a professor and a retired engineer were arrested and locked up for over 16 hours in Calcutta has blown the lid off a tactic increasingly being employed in Bengal to intimidate or settle scores with dissenters. The weapon of mass-scale harassment is an oft-mentioned but little-understood piece of paper called the FIR or first information report. The method is scary — a word that cropped up several...

 When Mamata Banerjee defeated the Communist Party of India (Marxist) last May after 34 years of power in West Bengal, her victory was portrayed by optimists as the beginning of a Kolkata Spring. Free of the communists’ rural thugs and urban heelers, the story went, the state would finally enter the 21st century. One year after Banerjee’s landslide, however, the new boss is looking a lot like the old one —...