Some members of the National Advisory Council , or NAC, are of the view that a small group in the council is driving its agenda to an extreme, making its recommendations vulnerable to government's rejection on the grounds of fiscal prudence. This not only ends wasting everyone's time, but also does a disservice to the poor and disadvantaged the council seeks to help, by indefinitely delaying progressive legislation, goes the...

Indian Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram is the nation's domestic security chief, overseeing a broad portfolio that includes battling a homegrown Maoist insurgency and routing out terrorists. The 65-year-old, a veteran of the ruling Congress Party who previously held senior economic posts and played a key role in the country's post-1991 liberalization, is considered a future contender for the post of prime minister. Recently, he spoke to The Wall Street Journal. Here...

There are many critics and sceptics with respect to the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, which came into being because of political pressure that managed to overcome quite strenuous opposition from some of the most influential policy making circles. It is likely that much of this criticism is not really because of the declared reasons, like fiscal costs (which are thus far very little) and potential leakage. Rather,...

While monetary policy is an important element of the artillery against inflation — and with the 25 basis point hike, the RBI did part of what it was expected to do to tighten policy — there is the fiscal task too. As Raghuram Rajan, adviser to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, points out, the Centre must control expenditure, cut subsidies and not start new spending programmes. Fiscal deficits are large and rising...

Even as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act enters its sixth year, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar said in Delhi on Thursday that cash transfers were the answer to the eternal questions about inefficiencies in government schemes. He had tried out direct cash transfers in his effort to give Bihar’s girls bicycles, he said, and discovered that the programme had a “92 per cent success rate”. No programme, he said,...