-Reuters On a hot afternoon, a bright orange bus drives into a slum area of the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, parking amidst shelters made of tarpaulins and bits of wood. Barefoot children come running, eyes shining, and troop inside.  It's a school on wheels that brings education to the doorstep of disadvantaged children such as these every day, halting for several hours at a time in different parts of...

It has to be but a means to development, not an end in itself Is India doing marvellously well, or is it failing terribly? Depending on whom you speak to, you could pick up either of those answers with some frequency. One story, very popular among a minority but a large enough group—of Indians who are doing very well (and among the media that cater largely to them)—runs something like...

Caught in the middle of a maelstrom of controversies, the Planning Commission has been accused of being disconnected from ground realities. Its 12th Plan hopes to fix that. A short while ago, the Congress general secretary and scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, Rahul Gandhi, remarked that members of the Planning Commission are not in touch with the ground realities in India. He could have been somewhat influenced by his father, former...

What kept Prime Minister Manmohan Singh busy after securing minister A Raja’s resignation on the night of November 14 last year?   He was writing a reply to National Advisory Council chairperson Sonia Gandhi’s letter on the practice of manual scavenging. On November 15, he wrote to her that he was asking the Minister of Social Justice & Empowerment to “examine how to strengthen” implementation of the Employment of Manual Scavengers and...

Today is the ''International Day for the Eradication of Poverty'', so it an appropriate day to note how necessary it still is to emphasise this concern among Indian policy makers. Sadly, lack of official awareness is evident in all sorts of recent policy measures, for example in the cynicism of increasing oil prices that feed into all other prices with cascading effects, even when inflation has already imposed huge burdens on...