Curbing inflationary expectations is the priority Food price inflation has been in double digits for almost a year. Officially this week it is clocking up 20 per cent, the highest in 11 years. Stories of inflation in pulses and vegetables have appeared repeatedly in newspapers all over the country. The minimum support price for wheat has more than doubled in the past three years. The sugarcane farmers invaded the roads of...

Missing job cards, fudged muster rolls and diversion of NREGS funds through fake bills. What the Rajasthan social audit has revealed is the tip of the iceberg.  Bhilwara-2009 invited a swift and strong backlash — the government backed off realising it had stepped into a quagmire of corruption The battle being fought in the panchayats, streets, offices, and courts of Rajasthan is not just about social audit To understand why civil society...

The Rajya Sabha on Thursday approved re-naming the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGREGA), but not before the Government was criticised for corruption in the implementation of the scheme launched in 2005. Responding to clarifications, Union Minister for Rural Development C.P. Joshi announced that there would be a “different wage index” under the scheme, one that may not necessarily be...

Paul A. Samuelson, the first American Nobel laureate in economics and the foremost academic economist of the 20th century, died Sunday at his home in Belmont, Mass. He was 94. His death was announced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which Samuelson helped build into one of the world’s great centres of graduate education in economics. In receiving the Nobel Prize in 1970, Samuelson was credited with transforming his discipline from...

In a year of sparse rains and spiralling food prices, with hundreds of districts being officially declared as drought-hit, a rally by activists in the capital demands a Food Entitlements Act.  Perhaps the most vocal demands at the rally were those aimed at a complete revamp of the Public Distribution System (PDS), starting with universal — instead of targeted — coverage. Over 5,000 grassroots activists, agricultural workers, farmers, lawyers, doctors and...