Reforms in the supply-chain system can help India tackle the demand-supply mismatch in essential food items Food inflation may have dropped to single digit but since that fall is set against last year’s elevated double-digit base, it continues to hurt the poor — 65 per cent of their disposable income goes towards food. The government often defends its failure to tame inflation by arguing that it has no magic wand to...

Its facets include concentration of media ownership and the transformation of news into a commodity. THE last two decades have witnessed a dramatic transformation of India's ‘mediascape' – a term first used by Arjun Appadurai, an academic of Indian origin based in the United States, to describe how visual imagery impacts the world and to describe and situate the role of the mass media in global cultural flows. While there...

DESPITE WHAT our reel-life heroes have shown us, perhaps it’s only possible to fight one villain at a time. Still, in his last few days on the job, Karnataka Lokayukta Santosh Hegde tried to battle two evils, with two reports that presented damning evidence of corruption in the BJP government. The first report, on illegal mining, had enough firepower to systematically dig holes in the state government. The second report,...

There is no gainsaying that corruption breeds cynicism which undermines the democratic foundations of our polity. There is no gainsaying, too, that corruption results in a net shift of resources away from the poor. There can therefore be no two opinions about the need for controlling corruption through an appropriate lok pal bill. But the impression is unavoidable that the current hullabaloo about ‘corruption’ constitutes a case of mistaken identity:...

It is the 21st century version of the classic rabbit and tortoise story. Last weekend, a group of cyclists decided to race against Jet-BlueAirlines in Los Angeles when one of its busiest highways was shut down for construction and renovation. To help people get across the town fast, JetBlue started a special flight service. A group of cyclists decided to challenge the airlines to a bikeversus-airlines race. It turned out...