Mahesh Kundu paid 2,500 rupees for a driving licence, Rupam Bhatia 5,000 rupees to be admitted to hospital and Vishrant Chandra 6,000 rupees for a marriage certificate. These are the commonplace bribery stories experienced by middle-class Indians who have poured into the streets to say "enough is enough". Corruption in India is as old as the Ramayana, when the evil demon Ravana bribed a guardian of hell to avoid punishment in...

Anyone who came in contact with Professor R.S. Sharma — students, teachers, ordinary men and women from different walks of life as this reporter did — could not have remained untouched by him. Gentle and with a sparkle in his eyes, he came out as strong, determined and always principled. Moreover, as a historian he was never locked up in the ivory tower of academia and did not shy away from...

-The Business Standard   Much depends on a strong implementation framework but the imposition of a cap by the Planning Commission could lead to arbitrary exclusions. Himanshu Assistant Professor of Economics, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University The methodology, which is based on the framework suggested by the Saxena Committee, uses indicators that have been refined using a large-scale pilot survey There are over 400 million poor (the number varies depending on which estimate you...

The proposed regulations aim to create a new countrywide infrastructure for trading of commodity-based securities in the form of electronic receipts as with equity shares on exchanges A committee under the Warehousing Development and Regulatory Authority (WDRA) has recommended regulatory changes that can effectively control prices of food items, improve lives of farmers and change the warehousing landscape in India. The proposed regulations, drafted in consultation with the capital market regulator, the...

-IANS   Nearly nine million Indian households, or 45 million individuals, saw their incomes rise above the threshold of $1.25 a day, or Rs.56, in the two decades ended 2010, reflecting the success of microfinance, says a survey. "A dramatic number of families moved out of poverty between 1990 and 2010," said the report, based on a survey of more than 15,000 Indian households, carried out by the India Development Foundation (IDF), a...