-The Business Standard Providing clean water to Delhi is no rocket science. What is missing is some political will and competent leadership In the early 1950s, the quality of urban water services in Delhi was similar to the best of other major urban centres of Asia. In fact, in 1950, shortly after the second World War, water provisioning in Delhi was better than Tokyo or Osaka. At that time, Tokyo was...

-The Times of India As India heads towards a bruising general election, one of the key issues in the minds of both people and political parties is jobs. Big parties and their star campaigners can already be heard harping on the theme. The reason is that the jobs scenario has been decidedly grim for more than a decade. Between 2000 and 2012, jobs have increased at an abysmal rate of just 2.2%...

-Live Mint The scheme represents Rs.2.3 trillion spent on wasteful rural consumption This week marked the eighth anniversary of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government's key rural intervention, launched in 200 districts initially in February 2006. To the extent that such populist schemes helped raise wages without raising productivity. They have contributed more to inflation than to rural wealth. Worse, such schemes have...

-IBN Agriculture and allied activities account for 14.1% of India's GDP in 2011-12 but the proportion of the people dependent for employment in this sector is as high as 58.2.The average annual growth rate of agriculture during the Eleventh Plan Period was about 3.6%. However, declining per capita availability of food grains is of major long term concern. For ensuring nutritional security, it is not only important to increase the per...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: A global analysis of how nations tackle environmental challenges has ranked India 155 among 178 nations and labelled the country's air quality among the worst in the world, tying it with China in exposing its population to hazardous air pollution. The Environmental Performance Index 2014, generated by researchers at Yale University in the US, has bracketed India among "bottom performers" on several indicators such as environmental health...