The advance estimate of national income in 2011-12, released recently by the Central Statistical Organisation points to a decline in India’s GDP growth rate from 8.4 per cent last year to 6.9 per this year. The government, obsessed with growth rates, is deeply disappointed. Hence there is already talk of the need to respond and demands that the Reserve Bank of India should reduce interest rates are being heard. There...

It would be grave folly to recoil from the N-option, our safest Nuclear Is Clear     The world needs cheap energy and, as of now, nuclear plants are the most efficient means to that end     Switching to fossil fuel sources will add to global warming. In extremis, the oceans could boil away.     The lesson from Fukushima is no worse than that tsunamis are a danger to everything in their path *** After the...

U.P.'s GDP grew at 7.28 per cent in the past five years, but the State ranks low in virtually every area of socio-economic development. IF statistics on gross domestic product (GDP) are the only criteria to evaluate the performance of a government, the Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) government in Uttar Pradesh will have to be rated as one with highly impressive credentials. For, India's most populous State has recorded a...

While Asian economies boomed before the global recession in 2008, the fruits of that progress did not translate into better wages or secure employment conditions for workers in the region. The International Labour Organisation (ILO)'s Asian Decent Work Decade launched in 2006 was aimed at five priority areas of competitiveness, productivity and jobs; labour market governance; youth employment, managing labour migration and local development for poverty reduction. Today workers' unions are...

-PTI   The United Nations has warned that the world is on the brink of another recession, projecting that global economic growth will slow down further in 2012 and even emerging powerhouses like India and China, which led the recovery last time, will get bogged down.  The UN 'World Economic Situation and Prospects 2012' report has cut the global growth forecast for next year to 2.6 per cent from 4 per cent in...