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

These are troubled times. Communal violence in Gujarat continues. Kashmir is on the boil after the assassination of Abdul Ghani Lone and the killing of relatives of Indian soldiers by militants.. Vajpayee is threatening war, Musharraf is threatening to retaliate

Many people reading about the recent spate of business scandals in the USA may conclude that capitalism is a pretty dreadful system. We have long moaned and groaned about crooked Indian businessmen who inflate profits, hide liabilities, manipulate markets, and

Gujarat has now been in communal flames for 75 days. Police firings on mobs has killed almost 200 people, yet not quelled communal hatred. Deploying the Army has not worked. What has gone wrong? I think the problem goes far

The Soviet Union may be dead, but its old anti-capitalist rhetoric lives on, reincarnated as anti-globalization. Street agitators at meetings of the World Bank or WTO still claim that we are being impoverished by the monopolistic power of multinationals. At