LIBERALISERS like Manmohan Singh can take heart from a new Princeton study which shows, contrary to the government\’s statistical methodology, that rural poverty in India declined sharply between ’87-88 and ’93-94. This may influence the debate within the Congress Party […]

Media reports today talk of drought and water scarcity as though they are the same thing. In fact they are very different. Droughts will come and go, but water scarcity will worsen steadily because of populist policies and poor governance.

MANY institutions in India have gone downhill in the last fifty years. But the Indian Institutes of Technology are an exception. They are centres of excellence that are now recognised as world class. Their graduates are grabbed by multinationals the

H-1B visas, that allow Indian infotech professionals to work in the US, face a new threat — black American professionals are lobbying the US Congress against such visas saying that they are tantamount to racial discrimination. While some Republican legislators

Three major new trends marked the 1990s. The first was the steady displacement of non-sectarian political parties by those based on religion, caste and region. The second was growing maladministration and criminalisation of politics. The third was a shift in

Last week I showed that data from the National Sample Survey (NSS), suggesting no progress in poverty alleviation in the 1990s, were not credible since other indicators suggested a continuing fall in poverty. The old Left has seized on the

WILL THE Clinton visit to India be followed by a relaxation of economic sanctions against India? A straw in the wind is the clearance by the governing board of the World Bank on Tuesday of three loans totalling $511 to

Has economic liberalisation failed to reduce poverty? Data from the National Sample Survey (NSS) of households suggest that the proportion of people below the poverty line has remained more or less unchanged around 36 per cent in the 1990s. So

The IMF and World Bank have long quarrelled about what policies would have helped most when the Asian financial crisis struck in 1997. On the eve of the spring meeting of the two organisations, the quarrel has been resuscitated by

Suddenly, last week, Indian tech stocks mimicked Nasdaq\’s mood swings and crashed to a near-meltdown, setting investors on the run, before settling back on their perch. What caused this economic bungee-jump? Was it a sign of bubble-bursting that the nebulous