-Outlook Labour is bought cheap, treated cheap-in India's garment factories as at Bangladeshi ones Even as the world remains morbidly fixated on the tragedy in Rana Plaza on the outskirts of Dhaka-the collapse of the textiles sweatshop three weeks ago buried 1,127 workers and sparked off a global outrage-it is business as usual at India's textile hubs. And you don't have to travel far from the city centre to...

-The Hindu   An open letter from Madhav Gadgil says Kasturirangan panel report will rob the region of its biodiversity Dear Dr. K. Kasturirangan, J.B.S. Haldane, the celebrated 19th-century scientist and humanist who quit England protesting its imperialistic invasion of Suez to become an Indian citizen, once said: "Reality is not only stranger than we suppose, but stranger than we CAN suppose!" I could never have imagined that you would be party to a...

-The Economic Times Arvind Panagariya, a professor of Indian economics at Columbia University, hits out at Nobel laureate and Harvard University professor Amartya Sen over his call to confront MPs with the "number of deaths" a delayed Food Security Bill can cause. The former chief economist at the Asian Development Bank counters Sen's argument that it is high social spending that has contributed to the economic growth of Asian economies such...

-The Hindustan Times "My permission is not required nor my opinion is sought in matters relating to tribals. My voice goes unheard," tribal affairs minister V Kishore Chandra Deo told HT, referring to what he called limited powers of his ministry in tribal welfare. The tribal affairs ministry was set up in 1999 for an integrated socio-economic development of the tribals, who account for 10.4 crore of the population. In an embarrassment for...

-Frontline Corruption tends to be greater in periods when there is a state-engineered redistribution of wealth in favour of a few at the explicit or implicit expense of the many. Liberalisation is one such period. IT cannot be verified and may not be true. But, the view that the record of graft and corruption during the two-term, nine-year rule of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) is the worst in India's post-Independence...