The Central Statistical Organisation estimate of overall GDP being likely to grow at 7.2 per cent this year has brought back the confidence of the industry and policymakers that the economy has truly turned the corner. But the growth of the farm sector is almost flat (-0.2 per cent), though this too is a pleasant surprise given that it was exposed to the worst drought since 1972. The real worry...

In the face of mounting criticism on the way the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (Mgnregs) was being implemented arbitrarily, the Rural Development Ministry on Tuesday agreed to set up a sub-group to suggest measures for effective execution of the law. Conceding the demand raised at the meeting of the Central Employment Guarantee Council (CEGC), the governing body for the Mgnregs, Rural Development Minister C.P. Joshi formed a six-member...

Monica Das Gupta is a senior social scientist at the World Bank. Her field research in Punjab, when she was at the National Council of Applied Economic Research, established that sex differentials in child mortality in rural Punjab persisted despite relative wealth, socio-economic development including rapid universalization of female education, fertility decline, and mortality decline. Amartya Sen’s writings drew attention to female foeticide and infanticide in Asia that led to...

By putting an open-ended moratorium on the commercial cultivation of the gene-altered Bt brinjal, environment minister Jairam Ramesh has ended the long-pending uncertainty over this issue. If, despite nine years of testing and safety trials to the satisfaction of the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC), some genuine concerns about the safety aspects of transgenic Bt brinjal have still been left unaddressed, they surely need to be addressed before the country’s...

This report is sure to come as a shocker for all those who thought the worst was over after believing that the recession is petering out. The recently released World Economic Situation and Prospects 2010 (WESP) of the United Nations (UN), predicts that the economic growth in the developing world will remain well below the pre-crisis pace of more than 7 per cent per annum. China’s and India’s economies are...