-The Economist An absence of optimism plays a large role in keeping people trapped in poverty THE idea that an infusion of hope can make a big difference to the lives of wretchedly poor people sounds like something dreamed up by a well-meaning activist or a tub-thumping politician. Yet this was the central thrust of a lecture at Harvard University on May 3rd by Esther Duflo, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute...

-The Indian Express India's wholesale price inflation accelerated 7.23% in April, compared with 6.89% in the previous month, as food and manufactured items turned dearer, heaping pressure on the central bank against any dovish approach to monetary easing despite shrinking economic activity. The government has revised up the inflation figure for February to 7.36% from 6.95% estimated earlier, according to the data released by the industry ministry on Monday. Prices of food articles...

-The Economic Times Springing a surprise, Tamil Nadu chief minister J Jayalalithaa on Saturday said the Kudankulam nuclear power project is all set to go on stream within 10 days. "Within 10 days we will start the project," an optimistic Jayalalithaa said after participating in the chief ministers' conference in New Delhi. Senior officials at the Nuclear Power Corporation Limited, however, did not share the CM's enthusiasm about the short deadline for...

Last month, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh exhorted the bureaucracy to be fearless, saying, "Civil servants should fight the tendency of not taking decisions because of the fear that things might go wrong and they might be penalized for that." The PM was just the latest to express concern about increasing bureaucratic stasis-foreign visitors have remarked upon it and even TOI has written about it earlier. But his words have clearly failed...

Remote controls are identified as technical devices which are used for various purposes ranging from the launching of space-ships to the monitoring of toy cars. But of late, these devices are being used to direct policies for nation states which are formally sovereign. We speak here of the powerful lobby of international credit rating agencies like Standard and Poor's (S&P), which has just delivered its sermon that India is no longer...