India’s private sector banks are busy drawing up plans to attack public sector banks in their backyard—rural India—by opening hundreds of new branches. They don’t need to seek the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) nod any more to open branches in smaller towns and large villages, the so-called tier III to VI centres with population below 50,000. The Indian central bank has also permitted private and public sector banks to...
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The World's Most Earthquake-Vulnerable Cities
The strongest earthquake to hit Haiti in more than 200 years crushed thousands of structures, from humble shacks to the National Palace and the headquarters of U.N. peacekeepers. Destroyed communications made it impossible to tell the extent of destruction from Tuesday afternoon's 7.0-magnitude tremor or to estimate the number of dead lying among the collapsed buildings in Haiti's capital of about 2 million people. International Red Cross spokesman Paul Conneally told the...
More »Has India's poorest state turned the corner? by Amarnath Tewary
Has India's poorest and most lawless state turned the corner? If you believe the government of the northern state of Bihar, the answer appears to be in the affirmative. According to it, Bihar clocked up a giddy growth rate of 11.03% in 2008-2009. This would make it India's second fastest growing state economy, just behind the industrially-developed western state of Gujarat. Not so long ago, Bihar was written off as a...
More »Delhi's homeless fight bitter cold and apathy by Gayathri Sreedharan
Shetty Chauhan, 60, died on the night of 12 January near a busy traffic roundabout in central Delhi. He had been ill with a heavy cold for eight days. Sitting on rubble next to his body just hours after he died, his wife Kamla explained that he had stopped eating and drinking tea prior to his death. When an ambulance took Shetty away, he was dressed in a light sweater and...
More »Bangladeshi villagers help themselves to Indian wood by Alastair Lawson
The thorny question of properly demarcating the maritime and land borders between India and Bangladesh has been highlighted during Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's first official visit to India. One of the legacies of the hasty exit of the British from India in 1947 is the fact that the boundary has never been properly marked out. It is still possible to find houses which straddle the border. But in recent years...
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