In 1985, Ashish Bose coined the term BIMARU while preparing a report on national population growth rate for Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. At the time, he was a professor at Delhi's Institute of Economic Growth. Ever since, BIMARU has been used to describe the four northern states that are seen as symptomatic of what's wrong with India.Shobhan Saxena asks Bose, 80, if Bihar is proof that BIMARU is history. Bihar...

Ajit Kumar Singh loves driving his father CP Singh’s brand new Mahindra Xylo on the potholed roads much more used to tractors carrying sugarcane in Ashokpur Tikia village of Gonda district in Uttar Pradesh. “It takes to the road in these interior regions much easily than the humble Alto we had earlier,” says the 20-year-old law student at the local degree college in Gonda, tapping his fingers on the freshly washed...

Elsewhere, people may be obsessed with the Commonwealth Games, but games of a different kind are being played in UP villages these days. Panchayat elections in UP are round the corner and these are being fought with an intensity not seen before. The poll are still three days away and at least eight persons have lost their lives in the last 15 days in the polls-related violence. Hoardings dot countryside; feasts...

Delhi NGOs initiate a process to survey the city's homeless people and reach welfare schemes to them. IN the narrow lanes of Khari Baoli, Asia's largest wholesale spice and grocery market in the crowded Old Delhi area near the Red Fort, labourers grapple with heavy sacks of grain, pulses, and so on as they load them on to wooden trolleys or unload them from trucks. There is no room for...

The official line is simple. Since we cannot afford to feed all the hungry, there must only be as many hungry as we can afford to feed. There was irony in the timing of the petrol price decontrol order. The decision, which also covered major hikes in diesel and kerosene prices, and affects hundreds of millions of people, came even as Manmohan Singh advised world leaders in Toronto on the need...