Archives: Development

The Union government, last month, decided to go in for an enumeration of castes other than Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Caste-wise enumeration had been given up as a matter of policy after Independence. The last census when caste-wise data was collected, tabulated and published in detail was the 1931 census. So why is the self-proclaimed progressive government harking us back to the past? It cannot be denied that the caste system does not exist in modern India. It does, but not in the form that it did 2,000 years ago. Today it wears a 21st century garb, and manifests...

For those still high after the "spectacular" Opening Ceremony of the Commonwealth Games, there's something that ought to bring them down a peg or two — India is Number One in the world in terms of the number of hungry people. And that would be 237.7 million at the last count. Proud moment for us all. No? The sobering number comes from The State of Food Insecurity in the World report released by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) on Wednesday. The study is a collaboration with the World Food Programme (WFP). And it is quite biased too....

A few months back a UN Human Rights office report on poverty in Afghanistan described a situation where an overwhelming majority of people were living in poverty: a situation which reinforced a strong sense of disillusionment and growing scepticism about the future of the democratisation process. The report identified abuse of power as a key driver of poverty. It described corrupted power structures at all levels of Afghan society and a lack of will on the part of the country’s leaders and international partners to address the long history of abuse. ...

A week from now world leaders would be meeting in New York to review progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and to chart out a course for accelerated action between now and 2015. There are apprehensions that the goals may not be achieved after all. According to a round-up released by a UN agency in March this year, the failure to achieve the MDGs so far is not because they are unreachable, or because time is too short, but because of unmet commitments, inadequate resources, and, crucially, a lack of focus and accountability. The UNDP in its report ‘The path to...

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s assertion that the Supreme Court should stay out of the realm of policymaking is valid. But his contention that his government cannot give to the poor the grains that are rotting in State godowns is not. If anything, it is an anti-people emotion. The Prime Minister was interacting with senior editors at his residence, when he made these points. He went on to insist, “How can foodgrains be distributed free to an estimated 37 per cent of the population which lives below the poverty line? It is not possible to give free foodgrains to all the poor.”...

When the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) launched its India Shining campaign, it had a fertile ground on which to sow the seeds of its electoral sloganeering. Newspaper editorials were going dizzy with India’s forever rising gross domestic product (GDP). Pundits were engaged in animated discussions over India being the economic superpower of the new century, nay millennium. Headlines every day would hysterically tell us that the Sensex had scaled a new high. Everyone was happy. Everyone was richer today than the day before. If what you saw or...

A disaster becomes a farce when the underlying tragedy gets buried, for whatever be the reason. That is just what has happened with the Supreme Court order paving the way for more malls and luxury apartments in the congested metropolis of Mumbai that should translate into billions of rupees for mill owners. It is not just the court ruling which will be environmentally calamitous for Mumbai. The real tragedy lies in the fact that all voices of reason have been drowned in the Babel of eulogies that have been flooding the newspapers and the news channels. Trust the media to slut...