“Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders.” This quote by US President Ronald Reagan summarises the significance attributed to facts, figures and data and the need to make them freely available across servers and bandwidths. In this age of internet and mobile networks, the amount of information available to us is far more than...

The Planning Commission’s definition of poverty is inexplicable In the urban sprawl that is Delhi, as in any other metro in the country, earning no more than Rs 25 per day with a family to support would prove nightmarish. Food and clothes have to be bought, there may be school-going children, colds, fevers or upset stomachs to get treated, someone with a chronic problem needing long-term treatment. Surely, someone living...

-The Indian Express   A day after the World Bank suggested that India should shrink its public distribution system (PDS) in favour of more cash transfers, Planning Commission Member (Agriculture) Abhijit Sen told select mediapersons it would be “stupid to abolish PDS”. A World Bank review of India’s social sector programmes titled “Social protection for a changing India”, commissioned by the Planning Commission, said though the PDS costs just 1 per cent...

-The Deccan Chronicle   India’s department of information technology that functions under the articulate and vociferous minister Kapil Sibal, has quietly pushed through an Act to censor online content. The recently drafted rules that give private arbiters a right to take down objectionable content, free speech advocates say will seriously hamper virtual communications, debate and discussions. In the past in a country, that is the largest democracy, the lawmakers have suggested bans on books,...

If the problems are macro, think micro. That seems to have been the guiding principle for Lekha-Mendha, the Maharashtra village that last month became the first in India to win the right to grow, harvest and sell bamboo. Such rights are the key goal of a five-year-old central law which aims to give tribal communities control over some resources of the jungles they live in. “There is no point in looking out...