Tom Sawyer, the mischievous young protagonist of Mark Twain's 19th century classic, is an unlikely hero for a social activist from rural West Bengal. But Shabnam Ramaswamy, a feisty 55-year-old from Murshidabad, likens herself to Tom Sawyer in more ways than one.  Like Sawyer, who, when given the onerous task of painting a wall, convinced his friends of the importance of his job and had them queuing up to help him,...

A widening corruption scandal that has touched India’s prime minister sent the country’s stock markets down sharply on Friday and threatened to tarnish the country’s image as a rising economic power. Setting off the turmoil was a report from the country’s auditor earlier this week that about $40 billion in wireless spectrum license fees had been squandered by the government’s telecommunications and information technology minister. On Thursday, India’s Supreme Court criticized...

NIIRA RADIA, the lobbyist at the heart of India’s audacious multi-billion telecom swindle, inaugurated a Krishna temple she funded in south Delhi on her birthday — that, interestingly, coincides with Indira Gandhi’s. Those present on the occasion said Radia prayed for long, presumably seeking divine intervention to wriggle out of the country’s biggest scandal. Before the temple visit, notices from the country’s Enforcement Directorate (ED), Income Tax (IT) Department and the...

The Andhra Pradesh Microfinance Institutions (Regulation of Money Lending) Ordinance, 2010, suggests there’s more politics than understanding of economics that went into it. The setting up of district registering authority under the ordinance, with elaborate powers to even cancel licences, will increase risks of operations posing serious hazard to business plans and will jeopardise the whole MFI network. Especially stifling is the requirement that MFIs have to submit a monthly...

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, since 2003, one Indian farmer has committed suicide every 30 minutes. In 2008, 16,196 farmers took their own lives, bringing the total number of farmer suicides in India between 1997 and 2008 to 199,132. (Significantly, P. Sainath is of the opinion that like all government data, these figures too are unreliable. For when women farmhands kill themselves, their deaths are not enlisted as...