As the Union government prepares to launch an offensive on Maoist revolutionaries, I am reminded of three conversations that I heard or had in Chhattisgarh in the summer of 2006. The first took place in the state capital, Raipur, at the home of the leading Congress politician, Mahendra Karma. Karma was the begetter of the Salwa Judum, a vigilante army that has been responsible for a wave of killings, rapes...
More »SEARCH RESULT
Total Matching Records found : 1588
Lack of transparency and debate in India-EU free trade agreement by Meena Menon
Seven rounds of trade talks between the EU and India have been concluded without any negotiating texts or positions of either party being made public. The widespread optimism about the possible signing of the India-European Union (EU) Free Trade Agreement (FTA) sometime in 2010 fails to take into account the many thorny issues that remain to be resolved. Not the least of them are the tariff negotiations on goods and...
More »CPM’s slide deeper than diagnosed
Calcutta, Oct 20: The CPM central committee appears to have underestimated the decline in the party’s vote in Bengal in the Lok Sabha polls last May. The final poll data compiled by the National Election Study (NES) now shows that the decline in the party’s — and the Left Front’s — vote was sharper than what had been calculated earlier. Also, the erosion was spread across all social groups, including...
More »Action Aid report on hunger identifies India as a loser
A new international report slams the Indian government for not doing enough to end hunger. It says hunger exists in India because of a lack of purchasing capacity of the poor rather due to insufficiency of food production. Titled “Who’s Really Fighting Hunger”?, (see the link below) the Action Aid report which was released on 16 October, 2009 reveals that in India 30 million people have been added to the...
More »GOVERNMENT AS A SERVICE by Ashok V Desai
If a country’s national income is rising, someone in the country must be getting richer. Unless income distribution is changing, all income classes must get richer at about the same pace. If a constant standard of living is defined to classify everyone below it as poor, then as incomes rise, the proportion of the poor so defined must shrink, eventually to zero. If income grows 5 per cent a year...
More »
