The suspended Gujarat cadre IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt has requested President Pratibha Patil to direct the Central government to set up a two-member inquiry commission to inquire into the role and conduct of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and other Ministers and the adequacy of the administrative measures taken to deal with the aftermath of the Godhra train carnage in the State in 2002. In a letter to Ms. Patil released...

The robust 9 per cent –plus growth in South Asia till 2010, driven largely by India, where it came down to around 7 per cent in 2011-12, had one major qualifier: it was mostly associated with a rapid rise in labour productivity rather than an expansion in employment, according to the latest report Global Employment Trends from International Labour Office. Up until the end of the millennium, that is just a...

An unnecessary controversy has been started by the release of the poverty estimates of 2009-10 by the planning commission. The controversy, which was entirely avoidable, was allowed to go on because of the poor handling of the issue by the planning commission. It is unfortunate that the planning commission was less than willing to own the Tendulkar committee report which was submitted in December 2009 and accepted by the commission...

Issues raised in reference go beyond those raised in clarificatory petition filed in Supreme Court The cabinet on Tuesday cleared a request by the department of telecommunications (DoT) for a presidential reference on the 2 February Supreme Court judgement cancelling 122 licence allocated to nine companies in January 2008, in an attempt aimed at clarifying seven issues arising from that order. One of the seven involves the allotment of telecom licences between...

There is no case whatsoever to construct a single poverty line based on a calorie or expenditure norm; all such lines are arbitrary and do not take into account the different dimensions of poverty. It is far better to focus on disaggregated information on a variety of parameters – education, housing, clothing, health, etc – which can give us unambiguous information about the different facets of poverty over the course...