It is a question that journalists in India are often asked without affection. “Don’t you have anything good to say?” A positive story, a happy story? The rebuke, when it is an e-mail or an online comment in response to an unflattering article about India, is sometimes accompanied by abuses or a general description of the journalist’s mother. And it is particularly passionate when it comes from the expatriate Indian whose...

-The United Nations   A new United Nations report warns that Asian nations are at risk of electoral violence, driven by real and perceived fraud and corruption, and stresses the need for strong oversight and other measures to strengthen election credibility. In “Understanding Electoral Violence in Asia,” the UN Development Programme (UNDP) studies electoral processes in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines and Thailand, drawing lessons and making recommendations to reduce the...

In early 1993 the late Mahbub ul Haq, Pakistan’s finance minister in the first Benazir Bhutto government and by then the famous architect of the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP’s) Human Development Report, called me and asked me to defend the economic record of democracies in the developing world at a UNDP conference. “Many in Asia argue,” he said to me, “that non-democratic countries have done better both in recording higher...

-PTI   Global rice production is expected to touch 476 million tonnes in 2011, on the back of improved weather conditions, as the influence of La Nina is expected to neutralise by June, United Nation's body FAO said. The world rice production reached a new record in 2010, at 464 million tonnes (696 million tonnes paddy), up 1.8 per cent from the previous season, Food and Agriculture Organisation said. "Although very preliminary, world...

Questions the logic behind the exclusion of the Prime Minister from the purview of the Lokpal Accusing the Govt. of betraying civil society and not being serious about fighting corruption Social activist Anna Hazare has said civil society's aim is to vest autonomy in the Lokpal, much on the lines of the Election Commission, the Supreme Court and the RTI (Central Information Commission). Control of bureaucracy He, however, favoured keeping the bureaucracy out of...