The ministry of personnel has shown a surprising lack of alacrity in prosecuting errant babus In August last year, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was keynote speaker at the annual meeting of India’s premier anti-corruption agency, the CBI. There, addressing officers of the agency and state vigilance bureaus, he made a telling remark, “Our anti-corruption agencies must make the cost of corruption unacceptably high for those indulging in this evil practice.” The prime...

India’s private sector banks are busy drawing up plans to attack public sector banks in their backyard—rural India—by opening hundreds of new branches. They don’t need to seek the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) nod any more to open branches in smaller towns and large villages, the so-called tier III to VI centres with population below 50,000. The Indian central bank has also permitted private and public sector banks to...

Tens of thousands of displaced people around the world will get micro-loans to set up their own businesses and become self-sufficient thanks to a new agreement between the UN refugee agency and a microfinance services organization set up by Bangladeshi Nobel Peace laureate Muhammad Yunus. Under a memorandum of understanding signed by Mr. Yunus and UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) António Guterres, the Grameen Trust will set up micro-loan...

A section of the media seems to be mighty impressed with Bihar’s miraculous (11.03%) average annual growth during the 2004-05 to 2008-09, supposedly akin to that of Gujarat (11.05%) but is there a catch in this stunning statistics? (See the graph below). While the media has quoted the Gross State Domestic Product at factor cost (at constant 1999-2000 prices) as provided by the Central Statistical Organization (CSO), but the corresponding...

Without policy efforts to deal specifically with issues such as reduced incomes and unemployment, the global economic crisis will be far from over. FOR most economic commentators, 2010 begins on an optimistic note. Just a year ago, there was much gloom about the world economy. The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression had broken out in full fury; asset markets in the United States, Europe and then most developing...