-The Economic Times India will have a normal monsoon this year, says the Met office. This is good news, even though the forecast does not rule out some slack during the second half of the season. What matters finally is the distribution of rainfall across space and time rather than the aggregate percentages. However, a good monsoon is only one side of the story to have a strong farm sector. Reforms are...

But non-farm income keeps economy afloat   New Delhi, April 25: The rural growth story is slowly losing sheen because of inflation and rising input costs. In fact, rural price level is higher than urban price level. The March Consumer Price Index number for rural India stood at 116.3, while that for urban India stood at 114.6. Mr Ajay Sriram, Chairman and Senior Managing Director, DCM Sriram Consolidated Ltd, says the rural growth...

Here’s a “growth story” that Standard and Poor’s missed: a piece of official statistics shows good old India has grown — literally. Over 5,000sqkm of wasteland has been converted into “net” usable terrain between 2005 and 2008, according to the Wasteland Atlas of India that was released today. Even Bengal, pilloried for profligacy and other wasteful pastimes, has done its modest bit to transform wasteland. But the big battles against barren land...

The economic crisis, the ecological crisis and the food crisis are a reflection of an outmoded and fossilised economic paradigm. It is a paradigm that grew out of mobilising resources for the war by creating the category of “growth”. It is rooted in the age of oil and fossil fuels. It is fossilised because it is obsolete, a product of the age of fossil fuels. If we have to address...

-The Economist For the first time ever, the number of poor people is declining everywhere THE past four years have seen the worst economic crisis since the 1930s and the biggest food-price increases since the 1970s. That must surely have swollen the ranks of the poor. Wrong. The best estimates for global poverty come from the World Bank’s Development Research Group, which has just updated from 2005 its figures for those living in...