The Times of India

For most of history, an agricultural crisis in India has meant scarcity. Today it means excess. We have a foodgrain mountain of over 60 million tones, as well as a mountain of unsold sugar. And unsold cotton stocks are so […]

Green fundamentalists are killers. Their opposition to genetically modified foods is killing people in famine-hit Africa today, and could threaten Indians in the future too. The USA has rushed food aid to southern Africa in the form of maize, the

When Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of Gujarat, decided to launch a Gaurav Yatra (journey of pride for Hindus), it reminded me of another incident which I could not put my finger on. When before, I wondered, had somebody declared that

Before the Johannesburg summit on the environment, I was asked what I thought it would achieve. I replied that the amount of hot air generated would surely contribute to rather than solve the problem of global warming. The millions of

Even cynics were shaken when Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray ordered Power Minister Suresh Prabhu to resign on the ground that he was too honest. We are used to the notion that politicians should resign if caught extorting bribes. Never

The government’s proposal to issue identity cards with machine-readable numbers to all citizens has, predictably, raised angry questions. Do you really want to be known as Citizen 1004762548 ? The Economic Times had a cartoon showing Home Minister Advani stamping

Whether the rains revive or not, India faces the worst drought since 1987. If it rains steadily for the next two weeks in drought-hit states, something can be retrieved from the wreckage of the monsoon. Even so rural India will

India needs to withdraw its army from the border quickly. This will reduce the economic costs of war tensions, and consolidate the gains of its spectacular diplomatic success in getting the US to arm-twist President Musharraf into formally renouncing terrorism.

For decades, I was anguished by the lack of calories for our poor. I believed our nutritionists, who that Indians were seriously underweight, calorie-deprived and physically deformed by malnutrition. I believed it made sense to define our poverty line in

Everybody agrees that there is more to life than money. Yet we measure living standards in rupees. Why? Because measuring non-monetary things may be important but is difficult to do. How do you measure the value of communal peace? Or