75% of the youth. Every third student. 65% of all families in Punjab are in the throes of a sweeping drug addiction. With little or no hope in sight. THE RAILWAY barrier in Angarh, a locality in the border city of Amritsar in Punjab signals the end of too many things. The rule of law. The reign of sense. The fear of crime. The signs of normality. Even the divisions of...

-The Wall Street Journal These days, Indian policymakers are debating how to create a vast new food entitlement program. There is talk of poor households struggling to cope with high food prices and malnourishment among their children. What you don’t hear much about, however, is the most tragic and outrageous consequence of India’s failure to feed its people adequately: starvation deaths. India is a nation that prides itself on having been self-sufficient in...

Ranchi, April 3: Newbie eighth grader Radha Kumari at Government Middle School in Ranchi’s Tharpakhna is happy over her promotion, but says it does not feel like she is in a new class. “No new textbooks,” she frowns. Radha is not alone. In fact, 60 lakh students between classes I and VIII studying in 40,000-odd state-run primary and middle schools are in a similar quandary. They have not received their new,...

UPA-II's plans to replace the existing fertiliser subsidy regime with direct cash transfers to farmers will be delayed as the fertiliser ministry is likely to scrap an intermediate phase where the subsidy was to be rerouted from companies to retailers this Summer. This puts paid to the fertilizer industry's expectation that very soon it would be out of the subsidy mechanism which locks up precious working capital. "We are rethinking the original...

Naseema Akhtar, 38, worries that her daily treks to collect clean water from the mountain springs around her village of Bonpora, in Kashmir’s Kupwara district, are getting longer. She is already doing more than seven km every day. "The higher up you go, the cleaner the water is likely to be, but there is a limit to how far one can climb to fetch a pitcher of water," she told IPS....