For a man who will inherit vast tracts of fertile farmland in Punjab, India's grain bowl, Jaswinder Singh made what seemed to him a logical career move -- he took a job with a telecoms company in New Delhi. "I can't go back to the village after an M.B.A. Delhi has more money, better quality of life. The job is more satisfying, and you don't depend on the weather or...

AS YOU drive west from Baroda — Gujarat’s cultural capital — towards the coast, it is hard not to marvel at the smooth, fourlane Vadodara-Bharuch National Highway Number 8, which gets you there. The only signs that suggest one is not on cruise control in an SUV somewhere on an expressway in America are occasional roadside dhabas with Indian names and poor passers-by, clad in saris or dhotis. Dwarfed by...

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh pledged Sunday to spend more on health care and education and make it easier for foreign investors to participate in India’s $1.2 trillion economy, one of the fastest growing in the world. At a World Economic Forum meeting in New Delhi, Mr. Singh said that public sector spending on health care would more than double to 2.5 percent of gross domestic product, and education spending would...

Sugar, to mix one’s metaphors, is heading for a perfect storm. And this is being made because of our own policies. By the year-end, retail prices of sugar in Delhi and Mumbai may cross the Rs 40 per kg barrier — an almost 150 per cent increase in less than 15 months. And no, you can’t blame climate change or monsoon failures for this. So, what triggered the sugar crisis? In...

The BBC's Chris Morris travels to the main source of the Ganges river to find out why the glaciers are melting. As the first light of dawn lit up the snow-covered mountain peaks, we trekked through a barren landscape 4,000 metres up in the Indian Himalayas, heading for the Gangotri glacier, the main source of the River Ganges. About 2km from our destination, we passed a rock inscribed with the...