For years, they have been waking up early and starting late. But India's northeast, which sees sunrise almost two hours before Mumbai, has decided it's time to set the clock right. The region's demand for a separate time zone has never been more vociferous April is usually the cruelest month for India's northeastern states. Cyclonic storms lash the region with vengeance and rip apart homes and hopes. But in all...

The institution of the BPL list has probably become the most potent symbol of the self-defeating approach of the Indian state towards poverty. Ostensibly this list, that identifies households below the poverty line so that benefits can be directed towards them, was meant as an instrument of poverty alleviation. Now it has become one of the biggest sources of obfuscation of the challenges of poverty. A poverty line is, at...

Thirty-eight years after he set out on his mission to provide basic services and solutions to the problems of rural India, Sanjit ‘Bunker’ Roy from Rajasthan stands in the company of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Master Blaster Sachin Tendulkar, noted economist Amartya Sen and author Chetan Bhagat as the Time magazine names him in the 2010 list of 100 people who most affect our world. It’s the work done by...

Around two decades ago, Lawrence Summers, then World Bank chief economist, outraged many when he argued in an internal memo that the economic logic behind dumping toxic Waste in low-wage countries was “impeccable”. His rationale: less developed countries are “under-polluted” and that “foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality” would be lesser in countries with lower wages. Cut to now and the thing to ask is: does India too believe...

Long-term greedy is a term that a Goldman Sachs partner made famous, by way of self-definition . It is as good a description as any of making profits in a sustainable fashion. Lafarge displayed short-term greed when it violated the law in obtaining forest clearance for a limestone mining project in Meghalaya’s Khasi hills, to supply raw material for its own cement plant in neighbouring Bangladesh. It described the mining...