The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) has had an unintended side effect: a record rise in the consumption of Indian Made Foreign Liquor (IMFL) among poor rural families, all thanks to the unprecedented sums of money that the scheme placed in their hands. And the politico-realtor lobby’s record bids for the two-year liquor licences across AP on Monday appears to be in the hope of reaping a bumper harvest...

WITH the introduction of short-term, high-yielding varieties of cereal and oil-seed crops, the cropping intensity has now reached almost 300 per cent in Punjab. Moreover, the intensive use of chemical fertilisers, insecticides and pesticides involve greater use of scarce groundwater resources. The water table has gone down alarmingly resulting in huge Investment on installation of costly submersible pumps to draw water for irrigation. This does not auger well for sustainable...

WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy told trade delegates in a fax on 12 May that cotton has become a “litmus test” for the “development dimension” of the Doha Round. At a recent review of the issue’s standing in WTO talks, some countries, such as Tanzania, alleged that no progress has been made since 2005. Leonce Kone, the trade minister from Burkina Faso - a cotton-exporting Least Developed Country (LDC) - joined Geneva-based...

The Indian press has expressed outrage at the sentences handed down to Union Carbide employees found guilty of negligence over the gas leak that killed thousands of people in Bhopal in 1984. One paper described the two-year sentences given to eight former Union Carbide executives as "absurdly light punishment" and "a travesty of justice". Several accused successive Indian governments of kowtowing to US business interests in their failure to bring the...

The India growth story is enviable. Despite plaguing problems, India has emerged stronger and resilient to the global crisis so far. India is expected to be the world's fastest growing economy by 2018, according to Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), the research arm of the Economist magazine. India, the second largest growing economy will overtake China as the fastest growing major economy with an average of eight per cent in the...