The PPP model proposed in the Eleventh Plan provides for no government or social control over education. It will lead to the privatisation and commercialisation of education using public funds.  Public-private partnership (PPP) has become a fashionable slogan in new development strategies, particularly over the last couple of decades. It is projected as an innovative idea to tap private resources and to encourage the active participation of the private sector...

The Empowered Group of Ministers (EGoM) on Friday urged the Planning Commission to work out the number of Below Poverty Line (BPL) households and the households' size that would be eligible for Rs. 3 per kg discounted food grains under the proposed National Food Security Bill. The Tendulkar Committee report had placed the BPL percentage at 37.2 which, at 2005 population and household size, works out to about 7.14 crore households...

So, Shashi Tharoor has gone. Lalit Modi may follow. Or not.   Cricket’s great jamboree may be cleaned up. Or not.   Does it matter so much?   The Indian Premier League (IPL) brouhaha could not have come at a worse time. India was, finally, if reluctantly, starting to focus on long-festering-but-urgent issues that prevent this country from being a just, equitable democracy. As Tharoor and Modi self-destructed, the circus around them diverted all...

With 130-140 million Indians likely to move to cities in the next decade and an equal number in the one after that, the development of urban India represents the biggest challenge you can think of -- in the next two decades, India will have to create as many new cities as it created in the last several hundred years. Alternately, the existing cities which are home to around 285 million people...

The Central budget of 2010-11 is a further step in the realisation of a vision of India vibrant with the income, wealth, saving, education and the entrepreneurial energy of the top 5-10 per cent of the population and the rest of Indians, serving that minority and surviving as barely literate, malnourished multitude.  With the accession of Rajiv Gandhi to power, a vision began to germinate. That vision was that of...