Silently, and without much sarkari fanfare, dramatic changes are taking place in the population indicators of some states that you won't see reflected in country-level data. Crude birth rate, that is, the number of live births per 1,000 population dipped from 26.4 to 22.8 for the whole country between 1998 and 2008. That's a 14% decline. But in eight major states, the decline was much more. In Punjab, birth rate...

Politicians, from the ruling party and opposition alike, are grappling with the problem of how to effectively communicate with their constituencies on the issue of high food inflation. One had thought it would be easy for the opposition to mount a campaign on rising prices against the ruling coalition, but it appears that inflation and its impact on the political economy is far more complex today than it was 10...

Noted agriculture scientist M.S. Swaminathan on Friday urged researchers to take the lead in forging strong relationships with farmers to help them improve their Incomes and yield per hectare. “The green revolution was a farmers' revolution. It were the farmers who triggered the high yield programme [in wheat],” he said in his Foundation Day Lecture on `Agro Bio-diversity Management for Sustainable Food Security' at the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR)...

The mainstream projections about India’s economic trajectory talk of how the country’s GDP will exceed that of Japan (whose economy today is more than thrice India’s size) by 2020. A large part of this sustained growth, it is assumed, will come from what is called the demographic dividend. India’s young and growing workforce, the standard argument goes, will ensure that the country’s wage rates keep it competitive for a long...

Earlier this week, India's opposition parties came together in a rare show of unity to take to the streets in cities across the country. They protested against the government's recent decision to raise fuel prices after it scrapped its subsidy of petrol prices in an effort to cut the budget deficit. Supporters of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party joined hands with their ideological rivals among the Communists to paralyse normal life in...