The termination of the proposed social audits of works carried out under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) in 16 panchayats -- one each from an equal number of districts -- in Rajasthan this past week has come as a rude shock to the social activists who pioneered the job scheme. Coming as it does from the Congress Government in the NREGS flagship State of Rajasthan, the development has...

The road to Khardung La begins in the Indian town of Leh on the northwestern fringe of the Himalayas. Exhaust-spewing army trucks rattle up the side of dry rock, past Buddhist monasteries clinging to the craggy mountainside and alongside small farms barely scraping fertility from the earth. Khardung La, the highest motorable mountain pass in the world, is more than 18,000 ft. above sea level, the air so thin that...

CITIES MAKE one simple promise to newcomers: Sacrifice yourself to me and your children shall prosper. This promise drew Ahmed Raza, a small-time wrestler from an Uttar Pradesh village and millions like him to the capital of newly-independent India. Raza kept his part of the bargain, yet half a century later, his daughter was pushed out of the city her father helped build, the only home she has known. “I...

To import rice or not? That is the question to which the government does not seem to have a clear-cut answer. Senior ministers have been losing no opportunity to talk about importing rice, citing the monsoon-induced shortfall in production as the reason. Somewhat contrarily, they have also been asserting that the government has enough stock of rice and there is no need for any worry about a supply shortage, but...

The same exclusive report, with different bylines, in three rival dailies. Swathes of advertising dolled up as news stories. Is ‘paid news’ getting institutionalised? “Young dynamic leadership: Ashokrao Chavan,” read the headline of a prominent news item in the Marathi daily Lokmat (October 10). That was 72 hours before the people of Maharashtra went to vote in the State Assembly polls. The item was attributed to the newspaper’s "Special Correspondent,"...