Indian Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram is the nation's domestic security chief, overseeing a broad portfolio that includes battling a homegrown Maoist insurgency and routing out terrorists. The 65-year-old, a veteran of the ruling Congress Party who previously held senior economic posts and played a key role in the country's post-1991 liberalization, is considered a future contender for the post of prime minister. Recently, he spoke to The Wall Street Journal. Here...

Even though five years have passed since the Right to Information Act came into existence, the Maharashtra government is yet to frame procedure rules for applicants to file appeals. s under this Act. Maharashtra is the only state in the country that is yet to draft the appeal procedure rules, which are supposed to prescribe the process of filing a query, including the submission of documents and the hearing for...

Mohali is slated to become one of the first districts in the country where preparations for issuing Unique Identification Numbers (UID) are scheduled to commence from February 15. District administration officials said that once the process of compiling data is commenced from the middle of this month, it would take at least four months for the disbursal of the 12-digit UID to residents of the district to start and would be...

Billions of dollars are being made by investors in a speculative "food bubble" that's created record food prices, starving millions and destabilising countries, experts now conclude. Wall Street investment firms and banks, along with their kin in London and Europe, were responsible for the technology dot-com bubble, the stock market bubble, and the recent U.S. and UK housing bubbles. They extracted enormous profits and their bonuses before the inevitable collapse of...

The countrywide share of corporate retail in food distribution tripled in the past four years when retail food prices showed the greatest increase. THE dramatic increase in food inflation over the past two years has been associated with several surprises. One major surprise has been how the top economic policymakers in the country have responded to it. The initial response was one of apparent disbelief, followed very quickly by the...