Earlier this week, India's opposition parties came together in a rare show of unity to take to the streets in cities across the country. They protested against the government's recent decision to raise fuel prices after it scrapped its subsidy of petrol prices in an effort to cut the budget deficit. Supporters of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party joined hands with their ideological rivals among the Communists to paralyse normal life in...

Work on a new base year will start the moment the government starts releasing key economic data such as the Wholesale Price Index (WPI) and the Index of Industrial Production (IIP) with 2004-05 as the reference point within a few months. The National Statistical Commission (NSC), under C. Rangarajan, has recommended that the base year be updated every five years. Officials in the ministry of statistics and programme implementation (Mospi) say...

Aruna Roy, the prominent political and social activist who spearheaded the campaign to institute the Right to Information Act in the 1990s, is an ardent critic of the anti-people and exclusionary policies of the first and the second United Progressive Alliance governments. A recipient of the Ramon Magsaysay Award for community leadership in 2000, she heads the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathana (a trade union of workers and peasants) in Rajasamand, Rajasthan,...

A working group on NREGA asks for indexing wages to the farm wage index, besides reducing work hours. Justice often comes with a price. If workers of the country's only largescale wage employment programme are to be ensured a decent minimum wage for 100 days every year, it is sure to make many others wince. For, low wages mean more production, cheaper stuff, and so on. The supporters of low wages also...

Suresh Tendulkar created a flutter among policymaking circles when a committee led by him raised the estimate for poor households in the country to 74 million from the Planning Commission estimate of 65.2 million. The former chairman of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council explained why his numbers are more credible in an interview with ET’s Pooja Suri and Amiti Sen. Excerpts: Why did your committee decide to accept the...