India&rsquo;s power minister Sushilkumar Shinde announced that the country will add another 88,000 mw of power generation over the next five years.

Feature: Who will buy 88,000 mw of power?

Business Standard

Two years ago, the narrow roads from the railway station to the Tirupur Exporters Association (TEA) office in Tirupur would take around 40 minutes to navigate. Today, devoid of traffic, it takes just 15 minutes. Back then, an occasional BMW, or a Mercedes, would whiz by. Today, none can be seen; what dots the roads instead is a plethora of godowns with rental signs.

Textile town struggles to survive

Back in February, a Japanese scientist made a forecast which should have had India worried right away. Toshio Yamagata, head of the Application Laboratory of Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, warned that the Indian sub-continent will experience a weaker monsoon this year. Around the same time, World Weather Inc. in the US cautioned that India should brace up for a relatively dry spell in August and September.

Consistently inconsistent

Rrishi Raote tracks how world press opinion on Manmohan Singh has changed between 1991 and 2012, from &ldquo;Singh is King&rdquo; to &ldquo;poodle&rdquo;.

Politician by accident

&ldquo;Did you had cereal for breakfast?&rdquo; Though most people may prefer to &lsquo;have&rsquo; cereal for breakfast, almost a third of engineering graduates in India would prefer to &lsquo;had&rsquo; breakfast. This poor grasp over grammar by engineering graduates is highlighted in a report by employability measurement and recruitment firm Aspiring Minds.

'43% engineers in India can't write correct English'

The e-waste rules, which require manufacturers of electronic wares to introduce mechanisms for collecting and recycling their goods, came into force on May 1&mdash;a year after those were notified. The one-year gap was meant to give stakeholders, including manufacturers, collectors or dismantlers and recyclers, a chance to put their mechanisms of e-waste management in place.

Rules of e-dump

The joke in the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) is that if you are an IFS officer who has slogged to learn Chinese, the chances are that you will be posted in Australia, given the administrative vagaries of the system.

Newsmaker: V S Sampath 

A firestorm of controversy has engulfed one of the pillars of the Indian education system&mdash;one that&rsquo;s considered sacrosanct and enjoys a pride of place for Indians worldwide&mdash;the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs).

New test at IIT causes uproar

India will need to retrain at least 285 million working Indians with no secondary education, said a study by McKinsey Global Institute (MGI). Of these, 150 million have not even completed primary education. Providing job-relevant vocational skills to these workers is a unique challenge that India faces, said the report.

India needs to retrain 285 mn working individuals: McKinsey

With Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee likely to be elevated to the president&rsquo;s post, the finance ministry is likely to see a churn of its senior officials.

FinMin likely to see major churn

As finance ministry officials remained glued to news flashes on the LCD screens in their rooms, others were constantly monitoring news on the web. The support staff got its share of the news feed by keeping a close watch on politicians visiting North Block. Till yesterday, everyone, from a peon to a secretary-level officer, had just one thought in their minds &mdash; prospects of their boss moving to Rashtrapati Bhavan.

After speculation, celebration

When Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee moved from South Block to North Block in May 2009, he had a familiar task at hand.

Pranab as FM: A tale of two stints

Its bonhomie with the Samajwadi Party (SP) back on track after the SP decided to support Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, the nominee of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) in the Presidential election, the Congress today described it as a &ldquo;supporting ally&rdquo;, albeit from outside.

Samajwadi Party a supporting ally, always stood by us: Congress

The southwest monsoon, after lying low for a while, is expected to&nbsp;cover the eastern and western parts of the country by June 22. Given that rains so far have been 42 per cent less than normal, much is being speculated about its performance. Director General of India Meteorological Department L S Rathore tells Sanjeeb Mukherjee there is no need to worry.

Much is being interpreted about the El Nino: L S Rathore

The Calcutta High Court has dealt another blow to the Mamata Banerjee government by ruling that the legislation passed by the West Bengal government is constitutionally invalid. A division bench of the High Court, consisting of Justices Pinaki Chandra Ghosh and Mrinal Kanti Chowdhury, set aside an earlier single bench order that had upheld the Act and held the piece of legislation as unconstitutional and void as the President's assent had not been taken.

10 facts about the Singur verdict

India&rsquo;s GDP growth rate slowed to 6.5 per cent in 2011-12 against 8.4 per cent in the previous two financial years. The index of industrial production, too, slowed down sharply to 0.1 per cent in April against 5.3 per cent in the same month last year. All indicators seem to point towards a general stalling of business activities.

Flush with funds, but unable to spend

Among economists who know their history, the mere mention of certain years evokes shivers. For example, three years ago Christina Romer, then the head of President Obama&rsquo;s Council of Economic Advisers, warned politicians not to re-enact 1937 &mdash; the year FDR shifted, far too soon, from fiscal stimulus to austerity, plunging the recovering economy back into recession. Unfortunately, this advice was ignored. But now I&rsquo;m hearing more and more about an even more fateful year. Suddenly normally calm economists are talking about 1931, the year everything fell apart.

The Great Abdication: Revisiting 1937 

It was only last week, that Virbhadra Singh was celebrating his 50 years in politics as well as his birthday with such fanfare at the Ice Skating Rink that it brought Shimla to a standstill. The five-time chief minister, three-time Union Minister, five-time MP and seven-time MLA, commands a mass following unparalleled by any other present political leader in the hill state of Himachal Pradesh, and second only to Dr Yashwant Parmar, the founder of the state.

Newsmaker: Virbhadra Singh

Though the India Meteorological Department (IMD) forecast a normal southwest monsoon this year. Commission for Agriculture Costs and Prices (CACP) Chairman Ashok Gulati tells Sanjeeb Mukherjee IMD&rsquo;s prediction should be taken with a pinch of salt, as data shows there is usually a deviation of eight-10 per cent from the standard margin of error in many met predictions.

Possibility of a normal monsoon is less than half: Ashok Gulati

Recently, the rupee hit its four-month low and recovered. It has been quite volatile for the whole FY12 and has depreciated almost 14% in last one year. The movement has been mainly on account of fundamental issues like the fragile global growth and weak Indian macro economic factors.

AK Prabhakar: Fundamentals weigh on the Rupee

Tax sops were announced for factories set up in hill states in 2001. A decade later, Rudrapur in Uttarakhand is a well-planned industrial town, while Baddi in Himachal Pradesh shows signs of haphazard development.

A tale of two towns

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