“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...

UNLESS THE prices of vegetables skyrocket and become a scandal — as they have over several weeks now, or as did the price of sugar last year — little in the out-of-sight world of Indian agriculture excites the imagination of the city folks, who influence, rather disproportionately, everything from government policies to newspaper content. Few of those who enjoy a hearty meal and wax lovingly on their favourite dishes can...

Caste is feudal, the market free and equal. Correct? Ask Ratan Lal Sirswal or Deepak Jatav. Sirswal, 75, had started off as a sweeper but is now one of the oldest businessmen in Panipat, Haryana. He quit his sweeper’s job once his handloom unit was on its feet. His success, he says, came largely because he hid the fact that he was born a Valmiki Dalit. Customers who discovered his caste origins...

For the preparation of the Commonwealth Games 2010, around Rs 17,400 crore have been spent on Delhi by the government over the past three years. The over-used word deployed by public leaders and officials to describe the city, which they hope will emerge from these exertions, is ‘world-class’. But forgotten are the men and women whose toil will make this ‘world-class’ city possible. At its peak in 2008-09, an estimated...

The government has increased the income ceiling a month a household for housing loans from the existing Rs. 3,300 to Rs. 5,000 for the economically weaker sections (EWS) category and from Rs. 3,301 — Rs. 7,000 to Rs. 5,001 — Rs. 10,000 for the Lower Income Groups (LIG). The revised ceilings will be applicable for definition of beneficiaries under government schemes for housing including the Interest Subsidy for Housing the Urban...