The bizarre politics behind the UPA's withdrawal of the controversial sugarcane price order. It was the quickest retreat that any government has made in recent times. It took just a day’s protest outside Parliament before the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government decided to withdraw the controversial provisions of a notification it had issued last month on the payment of fair and remunerative prices to sugarcane farmers. You may describe it as an...

FIVE HOURS’ bus ride from Kolkatta, just past the railway crossing at Beldanga, is a dilapidated concrete structure covered in half-torn posters variously advertising a Marxian utopia, films for red-blooded adults and bedroom advice for couples intent on children. Inside, in a tiny, dank room behind a desk, sits someone the Queen of England knows by name – and you should too. Lanky, awkward and at 16, the possessor of...

Chhattisgarh announced a proposed investment of more than Rs 1,77,000 crore in the state. Until October 2008, it had signed over a hundred mous with companies like Jindals, Tata Steel and Essar. After a couple of months of this announcement, a bureaucrat heading the state environment regulatory body resigned. “Development is the preferred option, provided the carrying capacity is available. There cannot be a trade-off at the cost of the health...

The capital got a fulsome dose of the country today, and the country a swift pledge from the capital. Within hours of swarming in from the restive western Uttar Pradesh neighbourhood and trapping New Delhi in feisty gridlock, farmers had forced a retreat by the government on sugarcane pricing and sent the Congress panicking over the electoral consequences of provoking rural anger. Rahul Gandhi, who is blue-printing the Congress’s comeback bid in...

Some news is considered more worth publicizing than some other news. This is part of an essential discipline, for otherwise we will remain perennially buried under an avalanche of data, information and gossip. The wheat, never mind the change of metaphor, has to be separated from the chaff. The media perform this task. Occasionally the government of the land helps the media to do the choosing: the authorities have their...