Fiscal slowdown has not affected India much  Forecasting a brighter future for the country’s economy by 2009-10 end, C. Rangarajan, Chairman, Economic Advisory Council to Prime Minister, said that if a consistent growth of four per cent in agriculture and nine per cent in the industrial and services sectors were maintained over the next two decades, it would propel India into the comity of developed nations. In a talk on...

India is expected to maintain last year’s record of being the world’s largest milk producer, with an estimated 110 million tonnes in 2008-09. The country achieved the distinction with the production of 104.8 million tonnes in the 2007-08, according to a spokesman of the National Dairy Development Board. The spokesman said the world’s milk production was expected to be 688 million tonnes in 2008-09, a marginal 1.7 per cent increase...

In a bid to curb the tendency among bureaucrats belonging to the All-India Services (AIS), including Indian Admini-trative Service (IAS) officers, to overstay on inter-cadre deputation for personal gains (location or otherwise), the government has decided to make the process of granting extension much harder. The Cabinet Committee on Appointment headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has in a meeting directed the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) to set out...

The World Trade Organisation’s seventh ministerial meeting held earlier this month at Geneva ended without anything substantial to show. But then the meeting was not meant to be “a substantive negotiating round.” It did not face the kind of controversies that marred previous ministerial meetings at Seattle (1999) and Cancun (2003), which collapsed amidst intense acrimony. At Geneva, trade ministers were given an agenda that deliberately skirted the subst antive...

Non-performing officers in the elite civil services -- IAS, IFS and IPS -- may be asked to pack up leaving space for "performers" if a plan to review their performance once they cross 50 years takes shape. Indicating that officers could be compulsorily retired for non-performance, home minister P Chidambaram said on Wednesday that there was a strong case for conducting a review of officials after they attain the age...