A top-ranking think tank attached with one of India's foremost business houses has warned that, despite the Government of India target have ensure that 40% of the energy needs would be fulfilled by renewable sources in about a decade, this is not going to happen over the next two decades or more.

  It was April-end 2009. As part of a journalists’ group taken to “cover” Lok Sabha elections on the polling day, we visited Vasania, known more as Shankarsinh Vaghela’s village, about 20 km north of Gujarat capital Gandhinagar. Brisk polling was on. Talking to the villagers, we were pretty impressed: While Vaghela himself was fighting from a constituency which is about 150 km away, here everyone seemed to vote Congress, the party he quit his 77th birthday, July 21. A local scribe rushed out of the polling booth and told me: “Do you know? There is no BJP polling agent in the booth! All are Vaghela men. So no vote for the BJP!” His “information” made me curious. I began inquiring from the Congress people, mostly youth, sitting a little way from the polling booth on what the reality was. One of them, whose main job was to provide slips to those going to the polling booth, told me quietly: “BJP people wouldn’t dare enter the polling booth. They dare not put up their tables outside the...

  A top international  report  has said that India fares “very badly, ranking 132 out of 152 countries in its commitment to reducing inequality – a very worrying situation given that the country is home to 1.2 billion people, many of whom live in extreme poverty.”

  A new Government of India survey has revealed that urban Gujarat’s “unincorporated enterprises” – those which are not registered under the Companies Act, 1956 – are poor pay masters compared to as many as 10 states. Conducted in 2015-16 by the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO), the survey shows that Gujarat’s hired workers earned on an average Rs 90,146 per person per annum, which is less than the national average of Rs 92,441.

  In what may sound music to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a Sydney-based non-profit organization, Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), has said that over the last one year “India has moved up four positions in the overall ranking from 141st to 137th” in Global Peace Index (GPI).