The steadily rising rate of economic growth in India has recently been around 8 percent per year (it is expected to be 9 percent this year), and there is much speculation about whether and when India may catch up with and surpass China’s over 10 percent growth rate. Despite the evident excitement that this subject seems to cause in India and abroad, it is surely rather silly to be obsessed...

In the 1920s, a young Tamil girl sang and starred in her school musical. It was, ostensibly, a private event with few outsiders. Yet so exceptional was her singing that Swadesamitran ran her photograph and wrote about the event. Seeing that photo in the newspaper, her household “was appalled” for, as the music historian V Sriram writes, “good, chaste women never had their photographs published in papers”. Today, this seems like...

India's 2011 census shows a serious decline in the number of girls under the age of seven - activists fear eight million female foetuses may have been aborted in the past decade. The BBC's Geeta Pandey in Delhi explores what has led to this crisis. Kulwant has three daughters aged 24, 23 and 20 and a son who is 16. In the years between the birth of her third daughter and her...

-The Hindu   The former Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court, A.P. Shah, on Friday criticised the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB), the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) and the Nuclear Power Corporation of India (NPCIL) for their “half-hearted approach” to the ongoing public hearing on the safety, viability and cost efficiency of nuclear energy. Mr. Shah is heading a ‘People's Tribunal' along with former Justice S.D. Pandit, which is conducting...

Like the majority of India's children, the Right to Education (RTE) Act has completed its first year facing malnourishment, neglect and routine criticism. A year after it was notified as law, the right to elementary education remains a dream. The law provides a 5-year window to its implementation but the dream it legislates looks as elusive now as it did when this countdown started. While one important clause is facing...