Food-price inflation in India, Asia’s third-largest economy, may accelerate in the second half as farmers are paying 20 percent more to grow crops, according to the commission that helps set minimum farm-product prices. “The cost of production is going up very fast,” Ashok Gulati, chairman of the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices, said in a telephone interview yesterday. “The labor cost has gone up dramatically in the past one year...

Bangalore-based lawyer Sajan Poovayya is an outside counsel to Google Inc. and other Internet companies who have been sued in India for content on their Web sites that users or authorities deem objectionable. Having been through many such cases, he’s in a good position to assess how a new set of controversial Indian Internet regulations affect the landscape. His verdict: the rules are sloppy, vague, perhaps unconstitutional, and wind up exposing...

India spends more on programs for the poor than most developing countries, but it has failed to eradicate poverty because of widespread corruption and faulty government administration, the World Bank said Wednesday. “India is not getting the ‘bang for the rupee’ that its significant expenditure would seem to warrant, and the needs of important population groups remain only party addressed,” John D. Blomquist, lead economist at the World Bank, wrote in...

Greenpeace [a non-governmental environmental organisation] on Wednesday urged the government not to provide subsidised diesel to profit-making telecom sector for running mobile towers, and force them to shift to greener energy solutions like solar-powered towers to check pollution being emitted from generators which are used to run around four lakh towers across the country. Releasing its report – ‘Dirty talking: A case for telecom to shift from diesel to renewable'– the...

-Live Mint   After the late Charan Singh, he was the moving force behind the formidable farm lobby in north India. Seen from that vantage, one could say he became a leader in his own right only after Singh left the stage Mahendra Singh Tikait’s political career took off long after productivity growth in Green Revolution had begun to taper off. The career of this rich farmers’ leader—who died on Sunday—was emblematic...