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Why make so much fuss about India’s poor and the government’s so-called poverty alleviation programmes? Under the Planning Commission definition, even rag pickers may not qualify to be identified as ‘poor.’ It isn’t easy to define poverty, leave alone attaching an income benchmark to it, in a highly complex and predominantly impoverished society such as India and the sundry nature of jobs that the poor – urban or rural – are forced to take up to stay alive. In fact, the poor are those who earn to stay alive and not live in the true sense of the term.

New Delhi: The suspended Indian Olympic Association (IOA) is in a defiant mood as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) shoots down its compromise formula.

New Delhi: Iran has ordered release of an Indian tanker detained which it had detained for 24 days at its Bandar Abbas port after being seized in Persian Gulf while carrying crude oil from Basrah in Iraq.

Dr Raghuram Rajan, taking over as Governor of RBI on September 4, has sought to ring a note of cheer for an economy in distress, committing himself to restore faith in the value of the rupee with some quick actions like facilitating banks to bring in ‘safe money’ as capital inflows to fund current account deficit over the next three months.

Will the Congress Party’s strategy to woo the electorate with populist welfare schemes work in the 2014 elections? Will there be a UPA-III? It is indeed an uphill task to overcome the present scams and policy paralysis for the UPA-II to come back to power. Sonia Gandhi and her advisers think that new welfare measures like the Food Security bill and the Land Acquisition bill, which have been passed by Parliament this week, might work just as well as the MGNREGA and the loan waiver schemes did in the 2009 polls.

NEW DELHI: The Current Account Deficit (CAD) in India is the result of failing exports and withdrawal of foreign investments. The effect has further tilted the balance of trade (BoT) against India. Almost all major exporting economies – such as China, Japan, USA, UK, Australia, South Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia – today enjoy favourable BoT advantage against India’s economic interests.

The Union Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas Veerappa Moily has set the fox among the chicken-coop by proposing a slew of ‘austerity measures’ as part of demand management of energy that includes shutting the petrol pump at nights. Predictably the proposal was greeted with stiff resentment as it smacks of fuel curfew when the citizens had lost the habit of standing in the queue for procuring essential things after the economy was liberalised and globalised in the 1990s.

The episode of Asaram Bapu has once again exposed our system, which is claimed to be based on the philosophy of equality. Equality, liberty and fraternity are the three pillars on which a democratic system is founded. We have accepted this philosophy and our Constitution tells in explicit term that all are equal before law and the state will not make differentiation among its citizens on the basis of religion, caste, color, language, sex and region. But to achieve the ideal of equality we have yet miles to go.

New Delhi: India is likely to raise the issue of currency volatilty caused due to the policy of Quantitative Easing 3 by US at the G-20 Summit and press for successful conclusion of the Doha Development Round at the G-20 Summit.

Thanks to the lack of insight of the Opposition and the clever floor management of the ruling UPA coalition the much touted National Food Security Bill-2013 was allowed to be passed by voice vote in the Lok Sabha last week. The Bill was passed by Rajya Sabha on Monday.