Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will chair the full-fledged meeting of the Planning Commission next month to approve the ‘Approach Paper' to the 12th Five Year Plan (2012-17) that is likely to focus on raising economic Growth to 9-9.5 per cent. Officials in the Finance Ministry said the approach paper would provide the broad framework of the government policy to be pursued in the five-year period to achieve the desired Growth rate....

More than one billion people will not get the basic sanitation and the clean water promised as such projects shrink sharply as a proportion of global aid budgets. A key development goal to halve the number of people without access to basic sanitation by 2015 will be missed because donor countries have diverted aid money away from unglamorous water projects, according to the World Bank and the charity WaterAid. Aid to...

-The Telegraph   India is trying to build a consensus on liberalising foreign direct investment (FDI) in retail and defence, finance minister Pranab Mukherjee today told a gathering of business leaders and policy makers in Washington. “Discussions are under way to build a consensus on further liberalisation of the FDI policy in retail and defence,” Mukherjee said. Differences exist within the Indian government on the appropriate policies for foreign direct investments in the...

TODAY, India is considered around the world as a rapidly developing country posting economic Growth rates of around 8-9 percent consistently over the last several years. Along with China, which is much further ahead, India is seen as a powerhouse of the global economy in the decades to come and already it is home to a very large number of dollar billionaires, perhaps the largest such number in Asia. In...

In early 1993 the late Mahbub ul Haq, Pakistan’s finance minister in the first Benazir Bhutto government and by then the famous architect of the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP’s) Human Development Report, called me and asked me to defend the economic record of democracies in the developing world at a UNDP conference. “Many in Asia argue,” he said to me, “that non-democratic countries have done better both in recording higher...