The prolonged monsoon and the diseases that come with it have really tested Delhi’s health-care infrastructure. There is a huge shortage of beds in government as well as private hospitals. You can find patients wreathing in fever in the corridors, emergency wards, everywhere. Why aren’t there enough hospitals around? Contrast this with the media: Nowhere in the world will you find so many newspapers, magazines and television channels than India....

VISHAL, the son of a farm labourer in the west Indian state of Maharashtra, is almost four. He should weigh around 16kg (35lb). But scooping him up from the floor costs his nursery teacher, a frail woman in a faded sari, little effort. She slips Vishal’s scrawny legs through two holes cut in the corners of a cloth sack, which she hooks to a weighing scale. The needle stops at...

The minister for environment and forests, Jairam Ramesh’s order stopping Vedanta Aluminum Ltd and the Orissa Mining Corporation from mining bauxite in the Niyamgiri Hills to feed the company’s adjacent Lanjigarh aluminum refinery plant located in one of the country’s poorest districts in the name of tribal interest tends to miss the wood for the trees. It is based on the report of a four-member expert group under N C...

India's mobile market continues to boom but there are signs of saturation, particularly in urban markets, according to analysts. The country's urban market, which accounts for only 30 percent of the country's population but 70 percent of telecommunications subscribers, is close to saturation, research firm iSuppli said Wednesday. However, iSuppli expects the rural market to pick up the slack in urban markets. India will have more than 1.2 billion mobile subscribers...

It’s been often asked why our officialdom, with all the intellectual capital at its command, is unable to quantify the number of the really poor in India. Is this such a difficult thing to do? It is all the more baffling because in recent times, the debate on India’s poverty has only further confounded ordinary citizens. The Planning Commission had come up with an assumed deprivation ratio of 27.5 per...