-San Francisco Chronicle   Bihar's chief minister, Nitish Kumar, who runs India's poorest and one of its most corrupt regions, announced a novel bid to tackle endemic poverty: taking the state's bureaucrats out of governing. His administration placed advertisements in newspapers this week, seeking a team of professionals to manage a $1.3 billion annual budget for programs involving job creation, housing, infrastructure and microfinance. In Bihar, a state of 103 million people in...

Do agencies like the Ford Foundation push their own agenda through the NGOs they support? It’s often said, tongue in cheek, that India’s “shadow” government works out of the nondescript, low-slung buildings abutting the Lodhi Garden in Delhi. That’s partly hubris, but it also stems from being close to the centre of power. This rarefied zone houses powerful “cultural” institutions like the India International Centre, as well as a host...

The global 'farmland grab' in Ethiopia and the rest of Africa has become competitive, with companies from Asia, including India and China, joining it. AN extraordinary new process has been at work in the past few years: the aggressive entry of Indian corporations into the markets for agricultural land in Africa. At one level, this process is simply following the hoary old tradition in global capitalism of firms (often supported...

The Lokpal legislation, in whatever form, will not be the only law we have on corruption. Apart from statutes on prohibition of benami transactions and prevention of money laundering, there is the IPC (Indian Penal Code). Under Sections 169 and 409 of IPC, depending on the offence, public servants can face imprisonment (from two years to life) and fines. This wasn't enough of a deterrent and after Bofors, we had...

The anti-corruption campaigns that has brought politicians and businessmen under the scanner-especially their links with the builder community being exposed in recent scams-has got the real estate sector worried. A number of industry insiders and sleuths have confirmed that the flow of unaccounted money (or black money) in the system, a big source of funding for the sector facing funds crunch, will get disrupted. An unhealthy nexus between builders and politicians...