Remember Arjun Sengupta Committee Report? It’s the same report which put paid to government’s shifting poverty estimates by asserting that almost 80% Indian survive on less than Rs 20 per day. Known as the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector (NCEUS), the report has gone missing from the public domain. The official website of NCEUS is no more working: http://nceus.gov.in, raising doubts regarding someone, somewhere trying to hide...

-Economic and Political Weekly  The Government of India is considering a proposal to notify farming as an essential service. This is ostensibly to bring drought relief to farmers suffering from a weak monsoon - a laudable goal indeed. However, if farming is deemed an "essential service", farmers and farm workers could lose many of their political and civic rights because the government can then invoke the Essential Services Maintenance Act to...

-Outlook The government has approved the National Policy on Information Technology, which aims to make at least one individual in every household e-literate among other objectives, DEITy Secretary J Satyanarayana said today. "The IT policy has been cleared by the Government of India recently and the Policy addresses a number of issues regarding the development of the ICT sector and using it for the growth of the country, not only from the...

-The Times of India Indian government is very actively working towards e-governance and the citizens with access to internet-enabled computers and smartphones too look forward to an easier life. After all, who doesn't like to use the online option provided by almost all the organizations and save time by avoiding the long queues at different utilities and departments.  However, the biggest irony is that many government or PSU websites that offer online...

A narrow education is making engineers oblivious to the importance of human interaction and raising the cost of even simple tasks My time in South Asia has rewarded me with an enigma: why is engineering so expensive here? Why is it often many times more expensive than in Australia, my home? My search for answers led me to shanty towns on the fringes of mega-cities. We compared an award winning Indian factory...