A full decade ago, Chandrababu Naidu made a point about the quick issuance of driving licences, and easy digital access to land records and house tax calculations — which he showcased to Bill Clinton when the then US president came visiting. Since then, all of Karnataka has digitised its land records through the Bhoomi project that now has a database on 20 million land holdings. Other states have similar projects....

Spewing summit The Copenhagen summit will generate more carbon emissions than any previous climate conference, equivalent to the annual output by 2,300 Americans or 660,000 Ethiopians. Delegates, journalists, activists and observers from almost 200 countries have gathered at the December 7-18 summit and their travel and work will create 46,200 tonnes of CO2, most of it from their flights to Copenhagen. This would fill nearly 10,000 Olympic swimming pools. The calculation includes...

A professor in formal attire, driving his own Beetle to the sprawling Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) campus and turning up in class to “open up visions of his students” — that’s how Bengal Finance minister Asim Dasgupta remembers his teacher, Paul A. Samuelson. Samuelson, who helped form the basis of modern economics, died yesterday at his home in Belmont, Massachusetts, after a brief illness. He was 94. “He was a...

The Suresh Tendulkar committee report revising upwards poverty estimates across the country may further strain government Finances with many of the states already demanding special status to address the issue and an enhanced allocation under many of the pro-poor schemes. The committee, in its report submitted to the Planning Commission last week, had estimated that 37% of India’s population is under the poverty line, while the proportion of the poor...

If Paul Samuelson, who died this weekend at the ripe age of 94, has been described in many obituaries as the greatest economist of the 20th century and the “founder of modern economics”, even though most professional economists would credit John Maynard Keynes with that title, it is because most students of economics around the world came to the discipline through his textbook. First published in 1948, Samuelson’s Economics: An...