As the 19th Commonwealth Games (CWG) ended here on Thursday, the Opposition parties on Friday raised the issue of “corruption” in organising the event and sought a thorough probe. They referred to the promises made by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi that no one found involved in “corruption” would be spared after the Games were over. BJP spokesman Prakash Javadekar told journalists, “I think the public-jury is out.”...

When the revenue departments sleep over cases they had lost in the courts and do not appeal for long, it is difficult to tell whether it is just red tape or something else. Their lethargy causes losses to the government and gains to tax dodgers. The new chief justice of India (CJI) started his stint in the Supreme Court a few months ago with a strict code for the indolent babus....

The amount of rural reportage in the Indian media remains far too low, with even important stories such as those on farmer suicides tending to be ignored. One of the outspoken critics of this trend has been P Sainath, rural-affairs editor of The Hindu  and 2007 winner of the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts. He was also the journalist who originally broke the story on...

The subsidy-driven development model of Punjab is one of the reasons why state is the worst performer in the country on economic equality front measured through Gini co-efficient. Not only this, revenue collection is the lowest in the country at 6.86% as against a national average of 10-12%. Subsidy is going to only the rich with peasants being pushed out of agriculture. It has come to focus as its reduction is...

Once, during a tour of his constituency in Tamil Nadu, Member of Parliament and former Panchayati Raj minister Mani Shankar Aiyar came across an eight-year-old boy. A chance meeting that he says threw light on why India stagnates at the 134th position in the United Nations Human Development Index. The boy, Aiyar said during a brief pause in his United Nations Millennium lecture at the British Council on Sunday, had got...