India's growth story in a crisis-hit world has been globally applauded. Still, the prime minister did well not to use his Independence Day address as a mere occasion for back-patting. This isn't yet "new India" where growth's gains percolate to every citizen. Not only must structural nuts and bolts be fixed before we get there, the economic blueprint itself needs a sharper reformist orientation. To its credit, the UPA has...

Suffering from extreme poverty and male oppression, the women of Darkali village in Madhya Pradesh, India, are now able to feed their families through employment under the MGNREGS. The wages obtained under the Scheme help them augment the family resource base. Jashmabai is working under the punishing sun on an earthen dam in her village of Darkali, in Madhya Pradesh's Alirajpur district, being built under the government-funded Mahatma Gandhi National Rural...

Governments in India — Centre and states — spend around one per cent of the country's GDP on health. Only five countries — Burundi, Myanmar, Pakistan , Sudan and Cambodia — have a lower figure than this. But private spending on the crucial sector is 4.2 per cent of GDP, among the top 20 countries in the world. Within this private spend, employers pay for about 9 per cent and...

The top 20% of India’s population has a more than 50% share of the national income in 2009-10, up from 36.7% in 1993-94, says a study by the National Council for Applied Economic Research, or NCAER. This would seem to confirm the charge that income disparities have increased in the reform years, 1991 onwards, and the rich have got richer as a freer economy has created more opportunities. According to...

Food rights activists demand universalisation and decentralisation of PDS A large number of food rights activists staged a protest outside the godown of the Food Corporation of India in Rourkela on Sunday demanding equitable distribution of food grains and universalisation and decentralisation of the public distribution system (PDS). More than 1,500 activists, academicians and those involved in various people's movements participated in the agitation against the rotting of food grains in...