After land acquisition and food security, the National Advisory Council (NAC) has set its sights farther, this time to monitor programme implementation at panchayats. The council led by Congress president Sonia Gandhi feels the ministry of statistics and programme implementation is not doing enough to monitor the panchayat programmes, while panchayati raj ministry has little say since most programmes are out of its purview. Monitoring panchayats would be part of an...

-The New York Times   India has 1.2 billion people, among them bankers, gurus, rag pickers, billionaires, snake charmers, software engineers, lentil farmers, rickshaw drivers, Maoist rebels, Bollywood movie stars and Vedic scholars, to name a few. Humanity runneth over. Except in one profession: India is searching for a hangman. Usually, India would not need one, given the rarity of executions. The last was in 2004. But in May, India's president unexpectedly rejected...

Cash transfers are now suggested by many as a silver bullet for addressing the problems that plague India’s anti-poverty programmes. This article argues instead for evidence-based policy and informed public debate to clarify the place, prospects and problems of cash transfers in India. By drawing on key empirical findings from academic and grey literature across the world an attempt is made to draw attention to three aspects of cash transfers...

The passport office in Hyderabad reported the highest number of passport applications recorded in Indian history (at least 450,000) and it expects an increase of 15-20% this year Jamuna Kunta sits stiffly in a plush red chair at the Hyderabad press club, holding her head proudly erect as she quietly recounts the events leading to her husband’s suicide in Dubai. A farmer from Karimnagar, a rural district in Andhra Pradesh, her husband...

Do you know that the highest number of corruption cases are registered in Maharashtra (4566) and the lowest in West Bengal (only 9) between 2000 and 2009? Do you also want to know how much property has been recovered from the corrupt in different states of India in the past ten years? But how does one systematically track corruption? How to get details of the number of cases going on...