The worse off the poor become, the healthier our Ministers get. Air India might not be doing as well we'd like it to. But the braveheart who flew it fearlessly into dense clouds of debt is doing okay. Praful Patel (who no longer holds the aviation portfolio) added, on average, over half a million rupees every day to his assets in 28 months between May 2009 and August 2011. This might...

In a startling affidavit before the Supreme Court, the Planning Commission has said an individual income of just Rs. 25 a day constitutes adequate “private expenditure on food, education and health.” The affidavit, submitted on Tuesday, bases its assertion on the findings of the Suresh Tendulkar Committee, which pegged the poverty line at Rs. 447 a month, or about Rs. 15 a day, at 2004-2005 prices. Experts reacted with dismay to the...

-San Francisco Chronicle   Bihar's chief minister, Nitish Kumar, who runs India's poorest and one of its most corrupt regions, announced a novel bid to tackle endemic poverty: taking the state's bureaucrats out of governing. His administration placed advertisements in newspapers this week, seeking a team of professionals to manage a $1.3 billion annual budget for programs involving job creation, housing, infrastructure and microfinance. In Bihar, a state of 103 million people in...

-The Times of India   The finance ministry is devising a voluntary tax disclosure scheme that could provide amnesty to people who have stashed unaccounted money in tax havens and other jurisdictions abroad by charging them a "levy". Finance minister Pranab Mukherjee, after a meeting with industry captains recently, activated a committee on black money set up last year to work out a scheme on voluntary disclosure. This scheme will allow corporates and...

While Indian psychiatrists have rejected a World Health Organisation (WHO) study portraying India as the depression capital of the world, they say it has indirectly drawn attention to an acute shortage of trained personnel and facilities to deal with mental illness. "Declaring India as having the highest rate of major depression in the world is an aberration in interpretation," Dr. Roy Abraham Kallivayalil, secretary-general of the World Association of Social Psychiatry,...