Remember Arjun Sengupta Committee Report? It’s the same report which put paid to government’s shifting poverty estimates by asserting that almost 80% Indian survive on less than Rs 20 per day. Known as the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector (NCEUS), the report has gone missing from the public domain. The official website of NCEUS is no more working: http://nceus.gov.in, raising doubts regarding someone, somewhere trying to hide...

-Economic and Political weekly Drawing on the research on basic education in West Bengal, this essay argues the case for a much criticised public education system, which needs to be reconsidered as regards its potential as a provider of quality education, even while addressing its many failings. The essay follows an approach, both critical and constructive, that underlines the collective onus of the public in realising the value of the public...

-Economic and Political Weekly The recent Comptroller and Auditor General's report on the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board and, more broadly, on nuclear safety regulation has highlighted many serious organisational and operational flaws. The report follows on a series of earlier CAG reports that documented cost and time overruns and poor performance at a number of nuclear facilities in the country. On the whole, the CAG reports offer a powerful indictment of...

-The Telegraph The Manmohan Singh government has decided to aggressively highlight the Supreme Court’s opinion on allocation of natural resources to debunk the CAG’s coal report that presumed losses of Rs 1.86 lakh crore. Although the government had given a restrained formal response yesterday, senior ministers P. Chidambaram, Salman Khurshid and Kapil Sibal were fielded again today. The ministers carefully avoided attacking the CAG directly but the essence of their argument was that...

-The Hindustan Times In response to the widespread protests and the nation-wide hartal last Thursday, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh addressed the nation on Friday and tried to explain why these decisions had become inevitable. The thrust of his argument was, “We need a revival in investor confidence, domestically and globally.” For this, the current high fiscal deficit must be contained and, hence, the hike in the prices of diesel and cap on...