-The Business Standard Providing clean water to Delhi is no rocket science. What is missing is some political will and competent leadership In the early 1950s, the quality of urban water services in Delhi was similar to the best of other major urban centres of Asia. In fact, in 1950, shortly after the second World War, water provisioning in Delhi was better than Tokyo or Osaka. At that time, Tokyo was...

-The Business Standard Chulhas - cook stoves of poor women who collect sticks, twigs, leaves and every other biomass material they can find to cook meals - are today at the centre of failing international action. The concern is that women are breathing toxic emissions from the stove and that these same emissions are also adding to the world's climate change burden. The Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 established that...

-The Hindu The latest ASER report finds once more that our government schools don't necessarily produce students who can read. That's why the work of volunteers becomes vital. Satyavathi studies in Class V in a government school in Hoskote, Karnataka. She was reading an entire page of text, rocking on her feet as she read. At the end, she stopped and looked at me, and when I smiled, she let out a...

-The Times of India The Planning Commission periodically revises the poverty line at the all-India and state levels based on large household expenditure surveys of the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO). These are typically once in five years. The figures of Rs 10.8 per capita per day in Gujarat's rural areas and Rs 16.7 in urban areas are based on the Planning Commission determined state-specific poverty line based on NSSO data for...

-The Business Standard The challenge to anti-inflation policy lies in better institutions and better evidence-based policy Our failure to rein in inflation has been costly. Economically, it has hurt growth. Poor and urban middle-class households have been affected the most. A combination of slowing growth and high inflation has weakened our macro-fundamentals: households fled financial savings, domestic and foreign investors lost confidence, and the rupee plunged. Politically, it has been a disaster. For...