-The Indian Express Eight years after the Sachar committee report on the condition of Muslims and creation of a Ministry of Minority Affairs, a post-Sachar evaluation committee, headed by former JNU professor Amitabh Kundu, has concluded that though a start has been made in addressing development deficits of the community, government interventions have not quite matched in scale the large numbers of the marginalised. Poverty levels among Muslims, the committee found, remained...

-The Hindu The failure of Narendra Modi's infrastructure plan reflects the larger failure of the Indian imagination, a mindless enumeration of ideas that have little or no bearing on Indian reality. When much of what is built is a half-baked imitation of disparate items tried and tested elsewhere, it becomes hard to fault Mr. Modi. If the recent image of Prime Minister Narendra Modi swinging on the jhula with Chinese President Xi...

-The Hindu Traditional hierarchies are too deeply entrenched to be reversed through one single measure; they need a concerted push, backed by strong will from different segments of society, including, but not confined to, politicians The rise of Other Backward Classes (OBC) and Dalit-Adivasi leaders in the political sphere is celebrated as India's "silent revolution." At the national level, this phenomenon has been especially marked since the early 1990s, leading to comments...

-The Hindu Business Line While the limitations of the concept of economic growth are acknowledged, we need a better index than HDI Despite claims that economic development as a branch of economic science emerged only in the 1950s, there is no doubt that the notion of development existed even in classical economic thought processes, emerging from the writings of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. The recognition of development economics as a discipline...

-The Indian Express   Human capital inequality is what India needs to be most concerned about right now.   THOMAS PIKETTY's Capital in the Twenty-First Century has attracted a great deal of attention, especially (it seems) where I live, in Washington DC. Some people have said the city has caught a severe case of "Piketty fever". Everyone seems to be talking about the book - clearly many more people than have read its 700...