Industrialist Ratan Tata has the capacity to challenge a breach of his privacy in the Supreme Court. But what about the nearly 60 crore Indian residents who don’t know what will become of the biometric data being collected by UIDAI? The leak of the Niira Radia tapes in India and thousands of US classified documents on WikiLeaks, has stirred up again the debate on privacy. Earlier this week, Tata group chairman...

The Food Corporation of India (FCI) should feel relieved that the private sector has stepped in to create additional foodgrain storage capacity, bridging the extant gap. However, it is difficult to fathom why much of the new warehousing capacity is sought to be put in place in grain-surplus states (production centres) — notably Punjab and Haryana, besides some others like Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra — rather than in...

Some people feel agriculture in India provides employment much beyond its capacity — that is, the number of people working on the farm is many times the actual requirement. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is among the proponents of this view. In his interaction with a group of editors last month, Singh said, “The only way we can raise our heads above poverty is for more people to be taken out of...

In 25 years, the Narmada Bachao Andolan has introduced an alternative development discourse in India. ON the full moon night in October, hundreds of people from all over India gathered at Bhilgaon, one of the many tribal villages in Nandurbar district of Maharashtra, in the foothills of the Satpura mountain range and on the banks of the river Narmada. The place resounded with jingles, revolutionary folk songs and strains of...

Two years ago, when I told some of my more cynical fellow-tribals from the journalistic fraternity that I was about to complete a textbook on media ethics, they smirked. Media ethics? That’s an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms, they said glibly. What became apparent to me then was that the image of the journalist in India has taken quite a battering. There are many among the aam admi who still...