Onion hubs were raided across the country today and officials claimed prices tumbled Rs 5-10 as a result of the income-tax department’s action a day after the Centre urged states to counter hoarding. Calcutta’s Sealdah wholesale mart and Asansol were among the places in Bengal that saw the swoops. Similar action was seen in several towns in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Bihar, Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Gujarat. Finance minister Pranab Mukherjee had written to...

Since 1947, successive governments have missed innumerable opportunities to put the country on the path of sustained, inclusive growth. Time and again, quixotic ideology has led to meaningless debates, antediluvian policy and inexplicable strangulation of capacity buildup in both physical and social infrastructure. Even today, while the gap between current and projected national demand and supply is well acknowledged, the government continues to drag its feet in creating the policy...

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has asked the rural development ministry to develop an index for fixing and revising wages under rural job scheme NREGA. The move follows a letter from Sonia Gandhi requesting Singh to find a way to ensure workers under the scheme are paid the minimum wages across the country. The minimum wages in several states, such as Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Bihar and Karnataka, are now higher than...

Thirty-year-old Santa Meena, a tribal woman of Saru panchayat is probably unaware that a panel headed by UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi and the Manmohan Singh-led government are struggling to arrive at the quantity of grain that BPL families should get under the Public Distribution System. All this mother of five knows is that she has to trudge 10 km from her hamlet to the ration shop in Saru (10 km from...

The government has firmed up an indexing system of minimum wages for various categories of labour to match the inflation after Congress President Sonia Gandhi asked Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to ensure that labourers are paid the minimum wages. The Rural Development Ministry is soon expected to issue a notification detailing the payment of minimum wages to various categories of workers, like industrial labourer or agricultural labourer, in tune with inflation,...