-The Hindu   Development is as much a process of providing services as of removing obstacles and giving freedom from all sorts of discrimination. In what is perhaps one of India's most communal, polarising, divisive and personalised election campaigns, we are told far too often that this election is really about development. Yet, none of the political parties clearly defines development either in their speeches or in their manifestoes. So, what do they...

-The New York Times   As politicians scramble for India's 815 million votes in the most expensive and closely contested general election in the nation's history, an unexpected protest is rumbling from what was once one of the country's most placid voter blocs: its farmers. The protest is inflamed by rising attention to the shocking suicide rate on India's hardscrabble farms. Since 1995, more than 290,000 farmers have killed themselves. Though that figure,...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Former West Bengal governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi on Tuesday stunned the CBI brass, describing the agency as 'department of dirty tricks (DDT)' which had gained disrepute for being the "government's hatchet", clothed in opacity with a perfume of mystery. Gandhi's remarks came while he delivered the 15th D P Kohli Memorial Lecture for CBI on "Eclipse at Noon: Shadows Over India's Conscience" with nearly 3000 officers of...

-The Telegraph   Experts from developing countries directly involved with preparing the just-published assessment of a global panel on climate change today claimed the synopsis for policymakers had been "watered down" compared with the detailed technical report. They also said scientists from developed countries had "hijacked" the report to shift the climate-change onus more on developing nations. In its fifth assessment report released in Berlin yesterday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had...

-The Business Standard   The Indian economy certainly has problems. But compared to the rest of the world, we will take ours any day Over the past couple of years, and particularly the past few months, we have become convinced that economists, the intelligentsia, fund managers, foreign brokers, don't read global macroeconomic news. All of the above have castigated the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government for having ruined the economy, causing a massive growth...