New rural development minister Jairam Ramesh, who declared his intent to focus on Naxal-hit areas on the day he took charge, is set to visit these. Ramesh, who his ministry officials describe as a man in a hurry, is setting off to Raipur, Jagdalpur and a few more places in Chhattisgarh. The visit is likely this week, sources said. At the signing of a loan agreement today with the World Bank...

A perverse, yet novel reason put forward to explain high inflation is that the poor are eating more as they are becoming less poor. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) has been extolled for being responsible for higher consumption, which in a way is a vindication of high inflation. The extended logic used here is that if the poor are eating more and we are paying high...

The man in the hot seat, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India says he’s never faced political pressure on any audit. The man in the hot seat, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India, Vinod Rai, says he’s never faced political pressure on any audit. On the 2G scam, he says his report clearly says the “amount of loss can be debated”. And it was the petroleum...

It is essential for India to raise the level of public expenditure in education to ensure quality. THE failure of the Indian state more than six decades after Independence to provide universal access to quality schooling and to ensure equal access to higher education among all socio-economic groups and across gender and region must surely rank among the more dismal and significant failures of the development project in the country....

  Can we agree in this country on a floor of human dignity below which we will not allow any human being to fall? No child, woman or man in this land will sleep hungry. No person shall be forced to sleep under the open sky. No parent shall send their child out to work instead of to school. And no one shall die because they cannot afford the cost of...