-Tehelka The sentencing of Wall Street wizard Rajat Gupta in the historic insider trading case has led to the fall of a one-time icon for many Indians “This is where destiny is taking me.” This is what former Goldman Sachs Group Inc director, Rajat Gupta, told old friend Pramod Bhasin, as he sat with a glass of scotch in hand, in a mid-town bar in New York. Little did Gupta know how prophetic...
More »SEARCH RESULT
Why rural sexual violence remains rife -Sanjoy Majumder
-Deccan Herald Dabra is a typical village in rural Haryana. It has narrow lanes with open drains and small houses built of brick and mud. Children play in the dirt while men sit around smoking. Not many outsiders visit this poor farming community. But outside one of the houses, two policemen stand on guard. Inside, a 16-year-old girl sits in one of the rooms surrounded by women. She is the reason the...
More »MGNREGA badly needs overhaul-V Ramakrishnan and Mukul Asher
-The Business Standard The rural jobs scheme can boost productivity in farm and textiles sector. There is mounting evidence that Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) of 2005, under which 100 days of guaranteed wage employment a year was to be provided to target households, is failing to meet its stated objectives. The total cumulative expenditure since 2005 under the MGNREGA is officially estimated to be Rs 1,50,000 crore, and the...
More »Virbhadra’s big fat LIC policies -Rohan Dua
-The Times of India SHIMLA: Former Himachal Pradesh chief minister Virbhadra Singh's interest in buying LIC policies bear an interesting pattern over the past 10 years. These policies are at the heart of a controversy with allegations of money laundering levelled against him by the BJP. Before the 2009 Lok Sabha polls, the 78-year-old state Congress chief had only two LIC policies for himself, each with a premium barely one-hundredth of that...
More »Where women fear to tread -Mahim Pratap Singh
-The Hindu In the State that leads in incidents of rape, the shame-inducing statistics are pushing the administration into action Time was when Payal (name changed to protect her identity), a standard VII student from Madhya Pradesh’s tribal dominated Betul district, had only school, friends and family on her mind. But her little world changed dramatically in March this year. The 15-year-old, a resident of Betul’s Majhinagar slum, was abducted in public by...
More »