Increased representation for women can unleash a broader process that can be set in motion by the strength of sheer numbers. One measure of whether it is important to have women in important policy formulation roles is to examine how a largely male-dominated system of government has served women. It turns out that India performs very poorly in this regard. Despite a few heartening examples to the contrary, in general Indian...

Nearly one third of Muslims in the nation survive on less than Rs 550 a month, economic think tank NCAER said, amid the ongoing debate on reservations in jobs and educational institutions for those belonging to the community. A survey by the National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER) said that three out of every 10 Muslims were below poverty line and lived on less than Rs 550 a month...

Despite tall claims, the NREGA programme is just a dud as most other “in the name of the poor” expenditures - and as much of a dud as predicted by Rajiv Gandhi A decade or so ago, Booker prize winner Arundhati Roy claimed that the building of dams in India had displaced more than 50 million people. This implied that one out of every three rural Indians had had to move...

“Wherever there is a lamp, there is darkness below it,” said Bava Bhalekar, a fisherman and local leader in this village roughly a hundred miles south of Mumbai. “The tragedy is that while our village has this project, we ourselves don’t have electricity.” “This project” is the power plant that Enron built. A decade after Enron withdrew from the project, the Indian government and two Indian companies are promising to...

Over 1,500 farmers from 16 villages took part in a panchayat held outside the Greater Noida Authority office on Sunday to decide the future course of action in their protest against the state government’s land acquisition policies and rates. The farmers, who have been protesting at the Authority’s local office for a month, have decided to forcibly stop work undertaken by Greater Noida Authority in the district from Monday. “We...