-Down to Earth   Poverty line figures hide people's aspirations There are lies, damn lies and statistics, American author Mark Twain once wrote echoing a similar statement by the British statesman Benjamin Disraeli. Statistics aim to reveal a lot, but they conceal vital information. This concealing tendency of statistics explains much of the flak received by the Planning Commission when it released figures on the poverty line. In 2012, the commission announced that...

-The Business Standard Why have Indian authorities woken up to the Ranbaxy case only now? The matter had been simmering for several years The Ranbaxy affair is one of the darkest chapters of India's business history. The company has admitted it fudged data so that it could launch its products in the United States. It has now paid $500 million as a penalty to settle the case. It is worse than Ramalinga...

-The Economic Times The government is planning to launch a probe into the alleged fudging of television viewership data by TAM Media Research after several complaints from broadcasters. A top official in the Union information and broadcasting ministry, who did not want to be identified, said the government has received a lot of complaints from TAM in the past. "A lot of people have been raising concerns because of which we are...

A LEAFY VILLAGE in Kerala, Pathanpara, never found access to India’s electricity grid. That is why for the last several years, this village has been generating its own electricity. Raju, a dhoti-clad cashew nut farmer, operates Pathanpara’s five kilowatt (KW) micro hydropower plant. He lives in the village and earns a salary of Rs 2,250, paid by the People’s Electricity Committee (PEC). The power generated is shared equally by the village,...

  What does the Niira Radia tapes, Wikileaks and whole body scanners have in common? It is the end of privacy both for the public individual or the private one. For the public individual, every thing that they speak or write can now be put in public domain. A quarter of a million cables from US Embassies around the world, some of them marked highly confidential are now public. So are...