Vice President Hamid Ansari Tuesday expressed concern over unavailability of information on the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005, or the act itself in 22 official languages of India and said this needs to be addressed at the earliest. Ansari was speaking at the second and the concluding day of the 4th annual RTI convention oragnised by the Central Information Commission (CIC) here. The two-day convention is organized by the Central...

Fishermen have abandoned lakes in the area after seawater raised alkaline levels in the wake of Alia Kultali, West Bengal: For the past 30 years, Atal Naskar has been making enough money from his three-acre fishing lake to feed a family of 10. But three months ago, this 50-year old fisherman fled his home in Kultali in West Bengal’s Sunderbans delta, hounded by moneylenders because he couldn’t repay a loan...

Will the Congress-NCP gain from a multiplicity of fronts which could dissipate the anti-Congress vote? Or will the Shiv Sena-BJP benefit from the Third Front’s cutting into the Congress-NCP vote?  Whatever the failings of Maharashtra’s political class, and these are many, a lack of optimism is not among them. Even after the last date for the withdrawal of nominations to the Assembly elections, there are more fronts, real and imagined,...

To help the poor, there must be one agreed way of identifying them first. If perceptions differ regarding who is poor and, thus, how many poor people there are, it will be difficult to select the right institutional measures and the amount of money to be spent on poverty eradication programmes. The differences between the findings of the N.C. Saxena report and and the Planning Commission’s assessment of the below-the-poverty-line...

India’s growth is not falling, although it is not as high as before If there is a crisis, there should be economics to deal with it; what use are economists if they are not around to help out when things get bad? And it is not enough to have economics. There was plenty of economics in 1929. As output and employment plummeted, economists said, this is good. It will take...