The data show that rural families simply cannot subsist on farm incomes alone There must be a bit of Gandhi in all of us because often our idea of India ultimately boils down to the kisan as the standard bearer of the lakhs of villages that comprise India. Perhaps that is why I tend to look for the signs of transformation in the lives of Indian farmers. The changes in...

-ENS Economic Bureau   Estimates on black money stashed away by Indians is still very much a grey area. So when the CBI Director emphatically declared on Monday that $500 billion of illegal money belonging to Indians was deposited in tax havens abroad, the figure caused more than a mild flutter.   Mainly because the information currently available on the black money economy is way too disparate and vague. Considering the available evidence, the...

Former plant director backs demands for compensation and jobs Agitating residents of villages in the vicinity of the Kaiga atomic power station have got support from unexpected quarters. The former project director of the plant, Paramahamsa Tewari, who helped to set up the installation in the early 1990s, has expressed support for the demands of the ‘struggle committee of villagers within five km of Kaiga plant,' whose protest at Karwar entered the...

Liquor baron Ponty Chadha’s mercurial rise is all ‘Maya’ A reclusive liquor baron may seem like an anomaly in these never-ending good times. But Gurdeep Singh Chadha—better known by the moniker Ponty Chadha—fits the bill. Often called “Mayawati’s financier”, the 57-year-old Ponty has been making large (if silent) waves for the political patronage he enjoys in Uttar Pradesh. Any bottle of liquor sold in India’s most populous state goes through his...

-IANS The government is considering creating a corpus fund of Rs.1,000 crore ($18.7 million) in the current fiscal that would encourage banks to give housing loans in 'significant volumes' to the urban poor, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said Tuesday. Addressing a conference on the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) here, Manmohan Singh said the corpus of Rs.1,000 would be set aside to create a credit risk guarantee fund that could...