For a man who will inherit vast tracts of fertile farmland in Punjab, India's grain bowl, Jaswinder Singh made what seemed to him a logical career move -- he took a job with a telecoms company in New Delhi. "I can't go back to the village after an M.B.A. Delhi has more money, better quality of life. The job is more satisfying, and you don't depend on the weather or...

AS YOU drive west from Baroda — Gujarat’s cultural capital — towards the coast, it is hard not to marvel at the smooth, fourlane Vadodara-Bharuch National Highway Number 8, which gets you there. The only signs that suggest one is not on cruise control in an SUV somewhere on an expressway in America are occasional roadside dhabas with Indian names and poor passers-by, clad in saris or dhotis. Dwarfed by...

In one section of the university building where I teach, there is an enormous and motley collection of discarded computer-related items, stacked and piled in an unwieldy mess. This has been lying around for a while now, nearly a year, not only because of the prolonged bureaucratic procedures involved in getting material "written off", but also because no one knows what to do with the stuff once it has actually...

There is a growing chorus of views - representing some very influential writers in India and elsewhere - in favour of direct cash transfer into poor people's bank accounts as a more efficient social security net than the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS). Economist Arvind Panagariya has called direct cash transfer ''the least costly policy to give immediate relief to the poor". Having returned from a series of field...

BARSUR, India — At the edge of the Indravati River, hundreds of miles from the nearest international border, India effectively ends. Indian paramilitary officers point machine guns across the water. The dense jungles and mountains on the other side belong to Maoist rebels dedicated to overthrowing the government. “That is their liberated zone,” said P. Bhojak, one of the officers stationed at the river’s edge in this town in the...