As food and civil supplies minister in the previous SP regime, Raja Bhaiya swindled Rs 100 crore from the PDS. As he presides over the food ministry once again, Ashish Khetan exposes the shocking loot A LITTLE MORE than a month ago, Akhilesh Yadav, chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, earned a landslide victory on the idea of hope: Ummeed ki cycle. He had promised clean governance and a corruption-free government. When...

-The Business Standard About 240 million more people in Asia, or 6.5 per cent of the population, could have been lifted out of poverty, had inequality not widened over the past 20 years, roughly the era coinciding with economic reforms in India, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) said in a report released on Wednesday. “Asia’s rapid growth is leaving millions behind, causing a widening gap between the rich and the poor that...

The finance ministry has asked public sector banks to devise products for Indian farmers to ensure they get adequate funding in emergencies. The government, the majority owner of such banks, wants them to roll out products such as emergency loans to farmers that will be linked to savings accounts, a weather index-based insurance product, and set up a credit guarantee fund that will aid farmers in the event of crop losses...

People with agricultural land that they do not wish to cultivate will soon have the option of depositing it in government land banks that will offer them consistent monetary returns. With an incentive system broadly on the lines of a Bank Account, the public land bank will offer payments based on the tenure and size of the holding with additional benefits if the land is leased out. "A lot of land is...

One would expect a debate such as the current one on poverty estimates to be conducted with a serious exploration of its various facets. However, instead of a comprehensive, fact-driven exploration, the debate has yielded aspersions on the intellectual honesty of academicians. Although given its electoral connotations, one does expect political biases to creep into the debate, the barrage of criticism hurled at the Planning Commission, over its affidavit in...