-The Business Standard   Demand-side control cannot be an answer beyond a point to India’s persistently high food price inflation, the World Bank said on Monday. Consumer price-based food inflation in India has been at 10-20 per cent for quite a long while, noted its report on ‘Food inflation in South Asia’. The Bank’s chief economist for the region, Kalpana Kochhar, said controlling inflation in India was a difficult job for the Reserve Bank...

Each day, one thousand women die in childbirth and one million people become infected with sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including 7,000 cases of HIV. Yet these numbers are preventable, experts insist, when countries possess the resources and willpower to address and deal with them. Dignitaries and high-level officials gathered this week to discuss reproductive health commodity security (RHCS), or, simply put, ensuring that people have access to essentials of reproductive health...

Anna Hazare's campaign may lead to a new Lokpal Bill, but it has legitimised middle-class vigilantism and other kinds of civil society mobilisation. NOW that Anna Hazare has declared victory, it is time to take stock of one of the most powerful recent mobilisations of people in India, focussed on influencing policy or lawmaking processes. The victory, however, is largely symbolic. The original demand of the movement, carefully built around Hazare's...

While BJP MP Tarun Vijay appeared on TV on Thursday to say that RTI activist Shehla Masood and her event management firm worked closely with the party's affiliated organizations, and that her killing was being politicized, Madhya Pradesh CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan said his government will write a second letter to the Centre demanding a CBI probe into the murder. Vijay, who is also a BJP spokesperson, said he was...

Country's top carmaker, Maruti Suzuki, plunged into another crisis as production at its Manesar plant was abruptly stopped for the second time in past two months after its sacked around twodozen workers. The assembly lines for Maruti's top selling cars such as the new Swift, AStar hatchbacks and Sx4 sedan came to a grinding halt after it terminated services of 11 workers and also suspended another 10, on charges of indiscipline...