Activists hope that a popular agitation against the setting up of a factory to manufacture asbestos products in the eastern Bihar state will result in a nationwide ban on the large-scale import into this country of the deadly mineral fibre. Following six months of agitation against the setting up of the factory in the Chainpur-Bishunpur area of Bihar’s Muzzaffarpur district, state chief minister Nitish Kumar sought to lay blame on the...

Inflation is beginning to hurt seriously, corruption is at an all-time high and the government is not doing enough to tackle either problem. That is the way India's big cities feel on the two big issues dominating headlines in recent months, according to an 8-city survey done exclusively for TOI. Asked what impact rising prices have had on their household budgets, only 3% said it has had a small impact. About...

Bihar is the first state in India to put information about students, teachers and educational status online as part of an effort to improve education Bihar has become the first state in the country to put details of Classes 1 to 8 of all its 70,000 government schools online. Only recently, a survey of primary education showed that the state, considered one of the most poorly developed in the country, had...

Almost a year after the state government promised to impose stringent laws to arrest the exploitation of farmers at the hands of private moneylenders, the rate of borrowing has gone up to 36-40% in the state. The laws remain on paper as the government has failed to put in place any regulatory body that could take action against the private moneylenders in the state. Highly-placed sources in the government said, “The...

There are many critics and sceptics with respect to the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, which came into being because of political pressure that managed to overcome quite strenuous opposition from some of the most influential policy making circles. It is likely that much of this criticism is not really because of the declared reasons, like fiscal costs (which are thus far very little) and potential leakage. Rather,...