The yawning gap between farm gate and market prices of agricultural commodities, including food and vegetables, and the role of distortions in agricultural produce marketing in fueling food inflation have been in the news in recent months, and were discussed in the meetings of the Union cabinet. The view that marketing reforms are vital to reducing this gap has now been endorsed by a group of chief ministers on food prices, headed by Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi. The Modi group&rsquo;s report was submitted to the prime minister last week. The CM&rsquo;s panel has recommended liberalisation of agricultural markets by allowing direct marketing and contract marketing. It has sought an end to the monopoly enjoyed by agricultural produce marketing committees (APMC) in routing farm produce to consumers, recommending greater involvement of private organised sector or cooperatives in retail trade.

View from the field

Business Standard

The glib talk of a &ldquo;demographic dividend&rdquo; seems to have erased all concern about population growth from public discourse in India. The term &ldquo;family planning&rdquo;, or even the politically correct term of &ldquo;family welfare&rdquo; has all but disappeared from the national lexicon, including the Economic Survey and Budget documents. At a time when even China is, in fact, reviewing its &lsquo;one child&rsquo; policy and many economies around the world are more worried about ageing, India is one of the world&rsquo;s youngest countries with more than half the population below 30 years of age. Also, the fertility rate, or the number of children per woman, has been declining steadily, almost halving from the late sixties through 2009. In several states where prosperity and education levels are higher &mdash; Andhra, Kerala, Punjab &mdash; among them fertility rates have fallen below replacement levels, putting them on a par with some advanced nations.

Demographic divide

The government of India has outlined very ambitious plans for building infrastructure in India over the coming decade. In the upcoming 12th plan (2012-2017), the government has targeted total infrastructure spend of about a trillion dollars. Of this, the private sector is supposed to fund 50 per cent.

Akash Prakash: More equity in infrastructure

The family, the story goes, had agreed to fund Anand Mahindra&rsquo;s education at Harvard. But the rules at that time did not allow scarce foreign exchange to be taken out of the country for undergraduate studies. Disheartened, Mahindra asked Harvard for a scholarship &mdash; there was no other way out. The Ivy League university, to Mahindra&rsquo;s pleasant surprise, decided to make an exception and admitted the scion of the industrialist family as a student on scholarship.

Bhupesh Bhandari: Being 'culturally' correct

How do I say I&rsquo;m sorry? Let me count the ways... Clearly Sushma Swaraj didn&rsquo;t think Manmohan Singh&rsquo;s assurance to the Lok Sabha this Monday that the government &ldquo;will take into consideration the guidelines given by the Supreme Court on the appointment of a new CVC&rdquo; was enough by way of an apology.

A is for apology

Nabobs were East India Company officers who carried out private trades in India and amassed huge wealth for themselves. Their lifestyle was the subject of ridicule in popular British media of the time. They were unscrupulous and could do anything for a small profit. One such man was Frederick Wilson. He had secured the right to cut deodar and pine trees from Sudarshan Shah, the King of Tehri Garhwal. With the royal firman under his arm, Wilson denuded hill after hill in Garhwal. The deforestation he caused took well over 100 years to recover from. Of course, at a very young age he had become the richest man in North India.

Raja and nabob

There has been a chorus of protest over the finance minister&rsquo;s proposal to impose a 5 per cent service tax on centrally air-conditioned hospitals that have more than 25 beds.

T N Ninan: The public option

Travelling from South to North Goa, as the villages and the beaches disappear under an encrustation of shops and cheap bars, the ghost of Frank Simoes rides with us. The advertising legend chronicled Goa with a clear if cynical eye, browsing in village bars like &ldquo;an entomologist in a rainforest&rdquo; as he noted the rapacity of the new wave of tourism.

The legend of Baumra Jap

Colonel Gaddafi claims the rebels are members of Al Qaeda, who have been administered hallucinogens by the CIA. Or possibly, they are CIA agents, who have mainlined drugs supplied by Al Qaeda. It may even be that the CIA and Al Qaeda have got together to drug random persons, who have rebelled under the influence.

Devangshu Datta: The colonel's speech

The art of success lies in saying as little as possible. That is what carried Mrs Gandhi and Narasimha Rao through.

Subir Roy: What's there to say?

On the face of it, there isn&rsquo;t much to link Tom Hooper&rsquo;s The King&rsquo;s Speech and Darren Aronofsky&rsquo;s Black Swan. The former is a solidly written and acted historical, made in the efficient but unimaginative, workmanlike style that characterises many British period films. The latter is a visually showy, full-blooded melodrama that is almost too imaginative for its own good, careening from psychological thriller to B-movie horror to profound commentary on artistic turmoil. But the two movies do have something in common: both are about people suffering from serious performance anxiety as they prepare to don a role. Colin Firth and Natalie Portman may have been Oscar royalty for a night, but they won the best actor and best actress statuettes for playing a very reluctant (real-life) king and a very paranoid (Swan) queen, respectively.

Performance anxiety scores

E M Forster&rsquo;s famous observation about hoping to &ldquo;have the guts to betray (his) country&rdquo; if he ever had to choose between his country and his friend emboldens me to write about a man whose name is anathema to many people in Bangladesh and India. History moves in cycles and Salauddin Quader Chowdhury&rsquo;s plight is part of a continuum of violence that did not begin with him and will not end with him either.

Sunanda K Datta-Ray: The bane of Bangladesh

In a couple of months, five states will be going to the polls and another seven in 2012. This is perhaps the right time to consider two ideas for electoral reforms that are in the air. First, simultaneous holding of elections to the Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabhas and second, state funding of elections.

Dorab R Sopariwala: Pressure points in poll reforms

The outcry against the Budget proposal to levy a 5 per cent service tax on the high-end health care system in India is in inverse proportion to the logic that is contained in it. The Indian Medical Association has described the tax as being comparable to the salt tax of the Gandhian era. A doctor as famous for his charity as for his deft use of scalpel has called it a &ldquo;misery tax&rdquo;.

Sukumar Mukhopadhyay: Why service tax on high-end health care must not be rolled back

Jawaharlal Nehru once reportedly said, &ldquo;You can tell the condition of a nation by looking at the status of its women.&rdquo; I got thinking about this on International Women&rsquo;s Day earlier this week when a student from the South Campus of the Delhi University was allegedly murdered outside her college. A chance conversation about the gruesome murder with a passing neighbour got me thinking a little more. She expressed her anger over the senseless incident, and then said, &ldquo;These days, it&rsquo;s impossible to control young girls!&rdquo; I thought I&rsquo;d heard wrong, till she added, &ldquo;if she&rsquo;d told her parents she was being troubled by a boy, they&rsquo;d have kept her out of college and under their watchful eyes &mdash; she may have been alive today!&rdquo; I could only gape at the lady who, in spite of being educated, believed that the only way women could be safe was to stay home.

Geetanjali Krishna: Step change in safety

Because I am an organiser, here&rsquo;s what I told my wife to put in her bags before leaving to spend a week in Mumbai nursing her mother through a surgery: wash-and-wear workday clothes, walking shoes (hospitals require you to do a lot of traipsing up and down), an inflatable pillow (for when you need to bed down but they won&rsquo;t give you a room because the patient is in an intensive care unit), several books, her reading glasses, a torch (don&rsquo;t ask me why, it&rsquo;s something my parents always pack) and a framed picture of the family should she miss us. Turning her back on what I felt was sound advice, here&rsquo;s what she packed instead: party wear in unsuitable chiffons and sequinned georgettes, her highest heels and Christian Dior shades, a case full of shampoos and cr&egrave;mes and lotions and lipsticks, gifts as giveaways &mdash; and her address book.

Kishore Singh: Nursing can be fun

Dr Sheena Iyengar once conceptualised an experiment that became so famous it is often cited back to her. On one occasion, the head of Fidelity Research, &ldquo;explained&rdquo; the implications to her! She set up tables offering jam samples at a store in Menlo Park, California. Shoppers could sample jams and use discount coupons to buy the flavours they liked. When six flavours were offered, 30 per cent of shoppers who sampled, also bought. When a larger number of flavours (up to 24) were offered, only 3 per cent bought. Excess of choice caused confusion.

Target: Returns that beat inflation

The Supreme Court, in keeping with its current stance, has taken a bold and progressive step in legalising passive &mdash; or unassisted &mdash; euthanasia. This places India among a handful of nations like the Benelux countries and Switzerland, which allow some form of mercy killing. In keeping with the enormity of the change that it has ushered in, the court has also put in place stringent safeguards to render negligible the chances of abuse.

No life without dignity

The jasmine or Arab revolution started with the sad story of a poor fruit seller who, like many of his young compatriots, did not have numerous work options. Besides the concern for population safety and democracy, the international community is also worried that upheavals might affect oil production.

Stephanie Dechamps: Jasmine revolution - The grim economic fallout

The issue of corruption has been dominating public discourse over the last few months. The winter session of Parliament was paralysed on this issue. While the prime minister has made it one of his priorities, a Group of Ministers (GoM) has been constituted and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has been making dramatic arrests. The public expects quick punishment of those who are guilty but is highly skeptical, and rightly so.

Ajay Shankar: Commonsense on tackling corruption

Corruption is not the problem. Rather, corruption, nepotism and special interests are the symptoms of a deep-rooted malaise in our government system that is threatening to dismantle democracy.

'Unfettered discretion causes corruption in the government'

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