India's cabinet has approved a major new policy to develop national manufacturing. The policy aims to create a 100 million jobs in the next 10 years and allows for a series of special new zones to support manufacturing growth. At the moment, that sector only accounts for about 16% of the country's gross domestic product. That has barely changed in the last three decades and is seen as well below India's potential. It is...

-The Telegraph   Tribals will now be involved in value-addition and marketing of minor forest produce (MFP) such as honey and tamarind so they can get better prices. For the first time, a group of private companies has come forward to set up units that will carry out the value-addition and train tribal youths in the process as well as marketing the products. The firms will set up such units under the public-private-partnerships (PPP),...

Five days after Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi accused Mayawati government in UP of mega-scale corruption in the centrally sponsored schemes, union Rural Development minister Jairam Ramesh has shot off a letter to UP chief minister Mayawati citing a huge scam in the MNREGA scheme in the state. According to sources, Jairam has specifically mentioned seven districts Balrampur, Gonda, Mahoba, Sonbhadra, Sant Kabir Nagar and Mirzapur where central funds have...

Rural Development minister Jairam Ramesh wants an urgent CBI inquiry into what he called brazen violation and deliberate embezzlement of MGNREGA funds in Uttar Pradesh. In a strongly worded letter to CM Mayawati — in the run up to the UP polls early next year — Ramesh described the inaction in dealing with the corrupt as a signal by the state to make money by openly flouting all procedures. "And...

One week from now, the United Nations estimates, the world’s population will reach seven billion. Because censuses are infrequent and incomplete, no one knows the precise date—the US Census Bureau puts it somewhere next March—but there can be no doubt that humanity is approaching a milestone. The first billion people accumulated over a leisurely interval, from the origins of humans hundreds of thousands of years ago to the early 1800s. Adding...