-The Times of India Spiralling prices of vegetables, oils and fats, milk and milk products pushed consumer price inflation to double digits in April in yet another hurdle to the Reserve Bank of India's efforts to ease interest rates. The double digit retail inflation rate also poses fresh challenges for the UPA government which has been on the back foot for its handling of the economy. Data released by the Central Statistics Office...

-The Economic Times The per capita income may have gone up by 14% during the last financial year, but the debt burden on every Indian - in the form of the government's debt - went up by 23%, latest official estimates show. According to finance ministry data, the per capita debt in India was estimated at nearly Rs 33,000 at the end of March 2012, compared to a little over Rs 26,600...

At last, the real anxieties lurking behind what has come to be called the “Ambedkar cartoon” controversy are out in the open. It is hideously clear by now that MPs “uniting across parties” are acting as one only to protect themselves from public scrutiny, debate and criticism. It turns out, as some of us suspected all along, that the “sentiments” that have been “hurt” this time are the easily bruised...

 Twenty-two newbie managers, fresh from B-schools across India, are raring to go. Only, they won’t make spreadsheets to sell soaps or fizzy drinks. From June, they will assist senior bureaucrats across 11 districts of Jharkhand where the Centre is funding uplift schemes. These managers — from IIT-Kharagpur, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS)-Mumbai, Visva-Bharti in Bengal’s Santiniketan, XISS-Ranchi, XLRI-Jamshedpur and others — are Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellows in some of...

-The economist UNDER a thatched roof, lit by a full, yellow moon, Shiv Kumari explains how she and her five children survive. She is a widow, 30 years old, living in a home made of packed mud. She works the nearby fields, draws a small pension, some food rations and gets a few days of paid labour each month from a rural make-work scheme. Semra village, made up of 70 households, most...