-AP The microfinance industry pursued a path of rapid business growth in recent years; two investigations now link it to debtor suicides   First they were stripped of their utensils, furniture, mobile phones, television sets, ration cards and heirloom gold jewellery. Then, some of them drank pesticide. One woman threw herself into a pond. Another jumped into a well with her children. Sometimes, the debt collectors watched nearby. More than 200 poor, debt-ridden residents of...

-PTI Anna Hazare and his team on Thursday met the Election Commission in a bid to raise the pitch for electoral reforms and demanded that the 'right to reject' option be included in electronic voting Machines. Hazare, along with his close associates Santosh Hegde, Prashant Bhushan, Arvind Kejriwal and Kiran Bedi, discussed the matter for about an hour with Chief Election Commissioner S Y Qureshi. According to Team Anna, the meeting was "very...

No one will deny that the least a democratic government can do for its people in a civilised society is to ensure access to food at affordable prices. Ensuring food security is, therefore, a fundamental responsibility of the state. Public distribution system (PDS) is the instrument through which food grains are made available to targeted beneficiaries. Government's resolve to provide for food security is laudable.  At the same time, it does...

-The Times of India   When district officials in Mehsana studied records of gynaecologists recently, they were stunned to find out that many were virtually running son-producing centres. Mehsana town is infamous with its ratio at just 760 girls per 1,000 boys - the lowest in the country. Some of the doctors in the region have individual ratios of just 600 per 1,000 boys in the past few months. Alarmed, government officials have...

Professor Arjun Appadurai is a Mumbaikar at heart; coming to the city is an annual pilgrimage for this internationa­lly renowned cultural theorist and anthropologist. Appadurai, 62, who studied in Mumbai’s Elphinstone College, is currently Goddard Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. He has been consultant and advisor to a wide range of public and private foundations such as The Smithsonian. In his seminal work Disjuncture and...