India's agriculture and allied sector grew by 3.8 per cent in the first six months of the current fiscal, against one per cent in the year-ago period on the back of better Kharif crop output. According to the GDP data released by the Central Statistical Organisation (CSO) today, the country's farm sector grew by 2.5 per cent and 4.4 per cent each in the first two quarters of the current fiscal,...

Now that it’s Millennium Development Goal (MDG) week, expect a host of studies/ articles/ commentaries around how India has failed to meet the important MDGs, on how parts of India are worse than sub-Saharan Africa or Bangladesh when it comes to nutrition, and so on. The UN set the ball rolling when it said that “with just five years to the 2015 deadline for achieving the MDGs, the country as a...

India has possibly the largest number of active non-government, not-for-profit organizations in the world. A recent study commissioned by the government put the number of such entities, accounted for till 2009, at 3.3 million. That is one NGO for less than 400 Indians, and many times the number of primary schools and primary health centres in India. Even this staggering number may be less than the actual number of NGOs active...

The India growth story is enviable. Despite plaguing problems, India has emerged stronger and resilient to the global crisis so far. India is expected to be the world's fastest growing economy by 2018, according to Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), the research arm of the Economist magazine. India, the second largest growing economy will overtake China as the fastest growing major economy with an average of eight per cent in the...

Work on a new base year will start the moment the government starts releasing key economic data such as the Wholesale Price Index (WPI) and the Index of Industrial Production (IIP) with 2004-05 as the reference point within a few months. The National Statistical Commission (NSC), under C. Rangarajan, has recommended that the base year be updated every five years. Officials in the ministry of statistics and programme implementation (Mospi) say...