“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...

WELL before Budget 2010-11 was presented, inflation had emerged as the principal economic problem in the country. With food-price inflation running at close to 20 per cent, even the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government at the Centre had been forced to recognise it as a problem that deserved as much attention as the objective of achieving a 9 or 10 per cent rate of growth, if not more. In fact,...

Spiralling prices of pulses have shown India’s dependence on imports. Pulses are integral to India’s diet but not its food policy. As a result, supply cannot meet demand. What are the consequences and solutions? Surendra Nath has switched to eating grass-pea, though he knows it is not good for health. But so is tobacco, he argues. He cannot do without pulses and pigeon-pea selling at Rs 100 a kg is beyond...

With the government successfully managing to partially lighten its burden by switching over to a nutrient-based subsidy scheme for fertilizers, the Economic Survey has now raised questions on the impact that food, fertilizer, kerosene and diesel subsidies have on poverty eradication. Instead, it has pitched for direct subsidy to the poor instead of price control, ostensibly to reduce diversion to the open market, leakage and adulteration. “The impact of these [food, fertilizer,...

The new nutrient based subsidy (NBS) regime cleared by the Union Cabinet on Thursday is likely to slash the governments subsidy bill and boost fertilizer production. But one of the major stated aims of the policy that of promoting a more balanced use of fertilizers by farmers may not be actualized unless other measures are implemented in tandem. That seems to be the view of many agriculture experts and economists,...