INSIDE his hovel of branches and rags, a grizzled pauper called Badshah Kale keeps a precious object. It is a note, scrawled by a policeman and framed by Mr Kale, proclaiming that he “is not a thief”. For members of his Pardhi tribe, who are among some 60m Indians considered criminal by tradition, this is treasure. Squatting beside Mr Kale, on a turd-strewn wasteland outside Ashti, a village in India’s western...

The watchword of India’s decennial population census for 2011 is “Our Census, Our Future”. By focusing on the future the managers of Census 2011 have wisely tried to steer away from the past in enumerating the present. Demographers and social scientists will understandably use the data to analyse changes in the economy and society since the last census of 2001. But Census 2011 is more about the future than the...

The thorny question of properly demarcating the maritime and land borders between India and Bangladesh has been highlighted during Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's first official visit to India. One of the legacies of the hasty exit of the British from India in 1947 is the fact that the boundary has never been properly marked out. It is still possible to find houses which straddle the border. But in recent years...

Fake entries and wrong entries have been the bane of the government’s flagship welfare plan — the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS). However, Uttar Pradesh has found a way out. Starting July 2009, the state Department of Rural Development introduced the biometric smart card attendance system in 10 villages of two blocks, and in 2010, it plans to extend the same to at least one block in each of...

It was to be a somber memorial, a remembrance of those who perished in a lethal milky fog. To mark the 25th anniversary of the world's worst industrial disaster, authorities planned to open up the now-dilapidated shell of the Union Carbide fertilizer plant, where in the wee hours of December 3, 1984, 40 tons of methyl isocyanate gas oozed out onto the sleeping city of Bhopal, India. About 4,000 people died instantly...