On the closing day of the winter session of Parliament, in which a united Opposition targeted the Congress, not even sparing Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, on the 2G spectrum scam issue, Congress president Sonia Gandhi came out strongly in his support.Addressing Congress Parliamentary Party members here on Monday, Ms. Gandhi said nothing should be done to “denigrate the institution of Prime Minister.”“Our government has nothing to hide. Our government has...

Recently an interesting article appeared in The New York Times on how after the completion of a social audit at Nagarkurnool in Andhra Pradesh, villagers punished a local official for swindling funds allocated to the central government's flagship project, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme. The irate villagers tied the official's hands and paraded him around the neighbouring villages. This is not a one-off incident; similar accounts have...

South Asia in general and India in particular have the dubious distinction of standing out for wrong reasons every time a new global poverty report is released. We not only have the largest number of underweight children, a very high maternal mortality rate and the world’s highest number of out of school children but we also top the global malnutrition chart. (See links below for more details)  However the 2011 United...

Ratan Tata has initiated an interesting debate on the nature of India’s capitalist class. His characterization of this class as crony capitalists may not be out of place given recent evidence on a politics, media, judiciary and corporate nexus.Crony capitalism is a system in which businesses multiply their wealth not by fair rules of the market, but through their nexus with governments. Classic examples are the distribution of legal permits,...

Some 350 million people living in rural areas being lifted out of extreme poverty in the past decade, according to The Rural Poverty Report, published by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a United Nations (UN) agency. However, in spite of this, more than a billion people around the world still continue to suffer. The UN describes extreme poverty as living on less than $1.25 (80p) a day. But factors such as...