A transparent assessment of the costs and risks associated with India's ambitious nuclear plans must be made before any ground is broken at Jaitapur or elsewhere. You really have to hand it to the nuclear industry. In any other sphere of the economy, a major industrial disaster is likely to have adverse, long-term financial consequences for the company or companies whose product or activity was involved in the accident, regardless of...

Three pronouncements made on three consecutive days this month by the Supreme Court of India have brought relief to different groups of economically and socially deprived people. The beneficiaries include children sold out by poor parents to work in circuses as child labour; young men and women determined to get married crossing caste barriers and harassed for that very reason by ‘khap panchayats'; and the hungry poor across the country...

When a farmer named Praveen Gawankar and two neighbors began a protest four years ago against a proposed nuclear power plant here in this coastal town, they were against it mainly for not-in-my-backyard reasons. They stood to lose mango orchards, cashew trees and rice fields, as the government forcibly acquired 2,300 acres to build six nuclear reactors — the biggest nuclear power plant ever proposed anywhere. But now, as a nuclear...

The RTI Act was envisaged as a potent weapon to fight corruption by ushering in an age of transparency. Yet powerful men in power have ganged up to throttle the law through deliberate delays and by arm-twisting applicants. A comprehensive look at the law. Aweapon in the hands of people. That was how the Right to Information (RTI) Act was envisaged, almost six years back. But the bureaucracy, in connivance with...

Government undecided on criteria to identify families below poverty line A survey by the Indian government in 2002 to determine households below poverty line (BPL) left out many poor families. Nearly a decade later, the Union Ministry of Rural Development (MORD) is trying to set the wrong right. But it is unable to decide on the criteria for identifying poor households. As a consequence, the BPL survey that was to...