Money makes news. When it is found, promiscuously. And when it is lost, presumptively. And when it is found to lie hidden. Also when it stands brazenly, as in election candidatures. Does hunger, to satisfy which money, income, wages — the power to purchase food — are needed, make news? Does the crisis in our agriculture make news? When Amartya Sen speaks of hunger and malnutrition, when MS Swaminathan does so...

By stubbornly overruling the National Advisory Council, the government risks defeating its purpose as a body that speaks for the poor and the disadvantaged. HAS the Manmohan Singh government begun to regard the National Advisory Council (NAC) as an adversary who should be undermined? Going by their exchanges on key issues such as food security, wages under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), and the implementation of the Scheduled Tribes...

Among the many reasons cited for India to proceed ahead with the Unique Identification (UID) project -that it will facilitate delivery of basic services, that it will plug leakages in public expenditure and that it will speed up achievement of targets in social sector schemes -   the most specious is perhaps the claim that it will help India reach her public health Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Despite impressive economic growth in...

You see those hills?” Jamshed Kanga, an illustrious IAS officer, then divisional commissioner, Pune, asked the noted development economist John Lewis who was visiting him in 1972, pointing to the barren Sahyadri range behind his office. “I will break every one of those if necessary, but will not let a single person starve.” It was the worst drought in the history of independent India, with a monsoon deficit of 25%...

Indian Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram is the nation's domestic security chief, overseeing a broad portfolio that includes battling a homegrown Maoist insurgency and routing out terrorists. The 65-year-old, a veteran of the ruling Congress Party who previously held senior economic posts and played a key role in the country's post-1991 liberalization, is considered a future contender for the post of prime minister. Recently, he spoke to The Wall Street Journal. Here...