The 2009 Parliamentary election returned the Congress party to power with more seats than even the most optimistic predictions. From 145 seats in 2004, the Congress increased its tally to 206 seats. No doubt, the five-year UPA rule had been characterised by unprecedented growth, but this is too simplistic an explanation since the Congress’s performance varied widely across the states in the elections. For instance, it won just nine out...

Late last month we received the exciting news that India now has a population of 1.21 billion. This figure generated less discussion than I expected. Maybe it would have been more mind-boggling a few months ago, before all the scams and scandals inured us to the large number of zeros that a billion signifies. Or maybe we were distracted by the other bad news in the census results — the...

Do we, the Indian middle class, see the corruption within us? I was too busy being corrupt to join Anna Hazare’s camp last week. For four days, I heard nothing but stories of our Tahrir Square-like revolution against the corrupt unfurling right under our noses in Delhi’s Jantar Mantar. But it was school admission time and I had some serious palm-greasing, document-fudging, string-pulling, weight-throwing and tout-chasing to do. I had...

India will overtake China in terms of population by 2025, an analysis of the provisional Census, 2011 data suggests. With more than 1.2 billion people, India has about 17.5 per cent (every sixth person in the world is an Indian) of humanity. China is the only country with a larger population, with 144 million more people. The United Nations has estimated that the Indian population grew at an annual rate of...

Even as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund annual Spring Meetings kicked into top gear, IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn made a strong case for reducing global inequality if Economic growth was to be sustained. Speaking earlier this week at the Brookings Institution, Mr. Kahn said, “Because growth beset by social tensions is not conducive to economic and financial stability, the IMF cannot be indifferent to distribution issues. And when...