Trade unions and labour rights activists blame the high suicide rate in Tirupur, Tamil Nadu, on the practices of the garment industry. TIRUPUR has carved out a niche for itself in the world of garments. Its phenomenal growth in the highly competitive global scenario, particularly in the past two decades, has been made possible by the entrepreneurial spirit of its manufacturers and exporters and the sweat and labour of thousands of...

Two days after the government scrapped a bauxite mining project in Orissa, Rahul Gandhi visited Niyamgiri, the ground zero of the anti-mine protests and told tribals that he was their sipahi in Delhi. Around the same time, farmers in Uttar Pradesh said they wouldn’t sell their land at the rates the government was offering. India is growing fast, but hassles over the acquisition of land are going to be the...

It’s been often asked why our officialdom, with all the intellectual capital at its command, is unable to quantify the number of the really poor in India. Is this such a difficult thing to do? It is all the more baffling because in recent times, the debate on India’s poverty has only further confounded ordinary citizens. The Planning Commission had come up with an assumed deprivation ratio of 27.5 per...

Bihar's programme of filing RTI applications through a call center is a novel one. The question is whether the model is effiicient enough to be replicated in other states like Karnataka. If you are in Bihar, you can get electronic goods repaired, phone numbers, buy things through call centres — and also file an RTI application. Zafar Hassan has filed two applications in the past two years through call centres,...

A combination of factors led by state policy has enabled the southern State to become a notable achiever with respect to some key indicators of development. In 2001, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen recorded an eyebrow-raising fact in his book, “Development as Freedom”, that Tamil Nadu and Kerala had both achieved much faster rates of decline in fertility than China had achieved since it introduced its one-child policy. That same year, the international...