-PTI NEW DELHI: Rising prices of onions and other vegetables pushed inflation to a five-month high of 5.79 per cent in July even as the government and RBI battled to stabilise the rupee. Inflation based on the Wholesale Price Index (WPI) was at 4.86 per cent in June. In July 2012, it was 7.52 per cent. The July number is above the Reserve Bank's comfort level of 4-5 per cent inflation. This is...

The declining trend in food price inflation globally may not hold true for inflationary trends faced domestically due to a weakening Indian Rupee vis-a-vis the US Dollar. The recently released FAO Food Price Index (nominal) has shown a declining trend in July for the third consecutive month owing to lower international prices for grains, soy & palm oil, meat, dairy and sugar. (See links below) Based on FAO Food Price...

-Frontline The midday meal scheme is a grand idea in a flawed school system. "THEY played here, studied here and got buried here!" (Yahin khela, yahin padha aur yahin ho gaya dafan). With these emphatic words, grieving parents buried the bodies of two children within the compound of the Dharmasati Gandaman Primary School of Masharakh block in Saran district of Bihar. This sentiment was expressed with great dignity even in the...

-Reuters BANGALORE: Inflation likely picked up slightly in July as its falling currency pushed up the price of imports, making raw materials more costly, and on rising food prices, a Reuters poll showed. Wholesale prices, India's key inflation measure, rose an annual 5 percent last month, the poll of 30 economists showed, hitting the ceiling of the Reserve Bank of India's commonly perceived comfort level. That was up slightly up from June's 4.89...

-Frontline A World Bank report on climate change warns that a warmer world will trap millions in poverty. "Much of the advance of European capitalists and other members of the European ruling class was at the cost of the colonised and enslaved peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America," says Amiya Kumar Bagchi in his book "Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital." Capitalist expansion following the Industrial Revolution involved...