Beware. If you are poor, go to a municipal or government hospital and seek medical help, chances are that anything can be done to you and if it affects your life or livelihood, there is nothing can be done to secure protection even if it is a case of medical negligence. Because, when you do not pay, you are getting things "not for a consideration" and when that consideration -- fees...

Borrowing was both the shaky foundation of global growth and the cause of its collapse. It started with a bust and it ended with an even bigger bust. In between was sandwiched an unsustainable boom. Banks have been humbled. Economists have been found wanting. Geopolitical power began to shift from west to east. That was the noughties that was. It barely seems five minutes ago that policymakers were fretting about the...

Paul A. Samuelson, the first American Nobel laureate in economics and the foremost academic economist of the 20th century, died Sunday at his home in Belmont, Mass. He was 94. His death was announced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which Samuelson helped build into one of the world’s great centres of graduate education in economics. In receiving the Nobel Prize in 1970, Samuelson was credited with transforming his discipline from...

Is drought being used as an excuse to delay the national Food Security Act? An informal network of organizations and individuals involved in the Right to Food Campaign believe so. The campaign groups are demanding that a national consultative process on an improved draft bill must be started immediately so that the proposed Food Security Act could be passed as soon as possible. The campaigners also demand that exports of...

Energy security is a major objective of all countries. Some are proactive and aggressive in this pursuit, like China; others like India are slow and procrastinate on major decisions and allow hope to overtake realistic assessments. This makes energy security in the foreseeable future an uncertain goal for India. Any discussion of energy security must keep in mind the Indian realities. Although in overall terms of commercial energy use to...