-Live Mint The varying demographic trends in modern India could create disagreements in the political system There were 180 million more Indians in 2011 than a decade ago. Around half this increase in population came from the villages and half from the cities. The urban population actually grew slightly more than the rural population, perhaps for the first time in Indian history. The big picture is generally known. It is in the...

-The Hindu     The killings of Mahendra Karma and his colleagues call not for retributive violence but for a deeper reflection on the discontent among the tribals of central India and their dispossession In the summer of 2006, I had a long conversation with Mahendra Karma, the Chhattisgarh Congress leader who was killed in a terror attack by the Naxalites last week. I was not alone - with me were five other members...

-The Hindu   The parliamentary committees on the howitzer scam and the stock market scandal protected the powerful and failed to fix accountability. The same is true in the spectrum case The current political situation brings back memories of 1989. The Prime Minister then was under a cloud in the Bofors scam. Many of his close associates like Lalit Suri and Ajitabh Bachchan were accused of wrong-doing. Today, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and...

-The Economic Times What is... Inequality has re-emerged as a core concern in developing and developed countries alike, thanks to the growing gap and frustration of a section of the middle class and the rich vis-a-vis the super rich. A World Bank Policy Research Working Paper (No. 6259) by Branko Milanovic shows that the incomes of the global top 1 per cent and the emerging middle classes in developing countries rose dramatically between...

-The Economic Times Arvind Panagariya, a professor of Indian economics at Columbia University, hits out at Nobel laureate and Harvard University professor Amartya Sen over his call to confront MPs with the "number of deaths" a delayed Food Security Bill can cause. The former chief economist at the Asian Development Bank counters Sen's argument that it is high social spending that has contributed to the economic growth of Asian economies such...