The audited balance sheets of the six largest political parties in India are hard to get and harder to decipher: they hide more than they reveal but are nonetheless worth close examination. Between them, the Congress, BJP, BSP, SP, NCP and CPM reported total income of Rs 1,046.76 crore for the year ending March 31, 2009. That was the year in which most of the funds for the 2009 Lok...

The land problem in Singur was a turning point in the political fortunes of both the Left Front and the Trinamul Congress. The story is far from complete, and the legal twists and turns between Mamata Banerjee and the house of Tata could unfold in surprising ways. The issue of adequate compensation for farmers, who had to part with their land, is still an open question to which many well...

While ‘data exclusivity’ clauses will not feature in the India-European Union free trade agreement (FTA), the threat posed by the impending deal to the world’s supply of cheap generic drugs is far from over. India’s commerce and industry minister Anand Sharma assured Michel Sidibe, chief of the United Nations joint programme on HIV and AIDS (UNAIDS) at a meeting this week that India would reject attempts by pharmaceutical giants to include...

As bank gears up for competition, it may further dilute environmental safeguard policies WITH financial institutions of emerging economies like India and China getting big time into development lending, the World Bank plans reforms to attract its borrowing countries. Some of the important plans are to disburse loans faster and on flexible terms. Bank watchers and civil society groups say the reforms, expected to be in force by the year-end, would...

It is essential for India to raise the level of public expenditure in education to ensure quality. THE failure of the Indian state more than six decades after Independence to provide universal access to quality schooling and to ensure equal access to higher education among all socio-economic groups and across gender and region must surely rank among the more dismal and significant failures of the development project in the country....