Mainstream Weekly

Most recent articles

• Punjab: Paradox of Outward Prosperity and Deepening Problems

  20 July 2015

  by Bharat Dogra, Jagmohan Singh and Reena Mehta
  There has been a growing awareness in recent years that rise in the GDP need not necessarily be associated with increasing real welfare. This realisation led to efforts to prepare other indi-cators of welfare such as the Human Develop-ment Index (HDI) incorporating health, education and other important features in addition to income. However, even such improvements may not be adequate as multidimensional distress conditions may deteriorate (…)

• MNCs Mar India (ns)

  20 July 2015

  by A.V.V.S.K. Rao
  “Two things are infinite:The Universe and human stupidity andI’m not sure about the Universe.”—Albert Einstein(1879-1955)
  I
  When India attained independence in 1947 the then Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, wanted to make the country wealthier by encouraging development of modern heavy industries. He had strong support from elite groups in the Indian National Congress and some leading industrialists coming from feudal background. The new political elite brought to (…)

• A Different Stroke: A Greenhorn in India’s Internal Emergency Administration (1975-77)

  20 July 2015, by A K Biswas

  The Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration (LBSNAA), Mussoorie dispatched 150 of us—all 1973 batch IAS officers—to different directions all over the country to report to the respective State governments for duties. This brought an end to a two-year institutional and field training. The field training involved a fortnight of Army attachment starting December 27, 1973 under the tent in a sector where the temperature dipped to subzero in Jammu. From Mussoorie all of us proceeded (…)

• Are MPs the Trustees of People?

  20 July 2015, by Kuldip Nayar

  Over the years, I have found the Supreme Court in Pakistan, a country under constant influence of the military, is far more progressive than ours although India has been functioning in a free, democratic environment. Not long ago, lawyers in Pakistan fought and won the battle for supremacy of the Chief Justice who was sequestered and suppressed by the Army Chiefs like Zia-ul Haq and Pervez Musharraf.
  Once again, the Pakistan Supreme Court has made us see our face in the mirror. In an (…)

• The Real Face of Modi’s Governance

  20 July 2015

  by Arun Srivastava
  In the seventies when the message from Naxalbari was spreading fast to other parts of India and the police, especially the Calcutta Police, was brutally killing youths and students, particularly those from Presidency College and Jadavpur University, on the plea of being Naxalites at the directive of the Congress Government headed by Siddhartha Shankar Ray, a theatre group had produced a play Football which depicted the craziness of the Bengali people towards football at (…)

• Food and Nutrition Aspects in India: A Growing Paradox

  20 July 2015

  by Abhijit Chakraborty
  The recent discussion on Food and Nutrition aspects in India is related to the growing paradox in relation to the declining calorie consumption known as the calorie consumption puzzle. But the debate sometimes tries to overlook the larger problems of some select population groups and their anthropometric data in relation to calorie consumption. This paper in its limited aim has tried to figure out one such problem in the State of Kerala which is known as God’s own (…)

• Inculcating Ethical Values to Improve Current State of Governance

  20 July 2015

  book review
  Aarti Khosla
  Ethics for Governance—Reinventing Public Services by B.P. Mathur; Routledge India (Taylor and Francis India), New Delhi; August 2014; pages 408; Rs 495.
  The need for good governance in the country is often reiterated. It is also one of the promises made by every party while seeking votes as they know that people are fed up with the present state of governance. Efforts are made by every government in power to bring about certain changes to improve upon the (…)

• Controversy on the National Anthem

  20 July 2015

  COMMUNICATION
  The controversy over the national anthem, raked up by the Rajasthan Governor, once again highlights the bigotry and narrow-mindedness of a section of this country’s opinion-makers who, even after a lapse of 114 years, are not reconciled to the fact that Rabindranath Tagore did not compose Janaganamana as an eulogy for King George V. This is also evident from a perusal of the debate on the subject on the internet. By raking up the controversy they are again calling into (…)

• Pradyot Lal Is No More

  20 July 2015

  Pradyot Lal, a highly talented journalist who joined the profession in the 1980s, passed away at night on July 12, 2015. A product of the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, Pradyot started his journalistic career in Patriot where he worked for several years before joining Blitz. Thereafter he worked in The Asian Age where he wrote some brilliant pieces at the time when M.J. Akbar was editing the publication. He then worked in Sahara Times and Tehelka. He was associated briefly with (…)

• Far More Ominous

  11 July 2015, by SC

  EDITORIAL
  The Times of India has twice in the past few days editorially brought into focus the seriousness of the Vyapam scam that has rocked not just the Madhya Pradesh Government headed by Shivraj Singh Chouhan but the Narendra Modi Government at the Centre and the entire BJP leadership at the national level as well. On July 7 the headline of the daily‘s editorial read: “Chouhan’s Shame: Vyapam is becoming BJP’s equivalent of 2G scam, Centre must intervene for a serious investigation”. (…)