Empowered in the Modi government, junior ministers have enough on their plate.
During the UPA government's second term in office, rural India's consumption expenditure grew at a faster pace than urban India's - for the first time since 1991.
The ceremony will be held at the Rashtrapati Bhavan.
India is threatening to block the World Trade Organization (WTO)'s trade facilitation agreement (TFA) reached at Bali last year unless its agricultural policies are permanently excluded from multilateral scrutiny.
In July, IRS officers in Mumbai held an incendiary meeting where they criticised the alleged interference in 'operational matters' by the department of revenue.
The eight states of the north-east account for 25 Lok Sabha seats and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party is eying to bag those in the Parliamentary election.
'The government is using the Intelligence Bureau to go after NGOs.' 'It is not only the NDA, the UPA also didn't like NGOs.' 'NGOs predominantly work with the poor. So, when you cancel an NGO, the affected are the poor, the Dalits, the tribals, the street children and the marginalised.'
This could be a major drag, not just on the empowerment of women but on the India growth story as well.
Nearly 31 million Indians are unemployed and looking for jobs. While economic growth has been humming along, the pace of job creation has been poor. A revealing excerpt from Dev Kar's India: Still A Shackled Giant.
Not only do you need an effective and independent regulator, you also need competition to flourish.
One thing is certain: The part-Goan, part-Malayali group CEO of Air Asia is not your usual boardroom CEO, and he cultivates the maverick businessman image, buying race car teams and football clubs and taking off-beat bets with his mentor and now buddy Richard Branson of Virgin.
'The middle class is already alienated.' 'If the stockmarket is destabilised, the BJP is finished; the party will lose in every town.' 'And if the stockmarket crash happens now, the BJP will not cross the 150 mark in 2019.'
'Swaraj Samvad sees itself in the role of a watchdog in Delhi,' Professor Anand Kumar tells Rediff.com.
'The Modi government needs some big private sector trophies to affirm its anti-corruption credentials before the polls.' 'So on whose neck will the sword fall next?' 'To that extent, the outing of the ICICI Bank-Videocon story is cathartic,' says Shekhar Gupta.
The then prime minister Manmohan Singh had visited Doha in 2008.
Amethi's member of Parliament failed to use his first formal television interview to reach out to the people in general and the electorate in particular ahead of the crucial elections in which the Congress has already been written off by opinion polls and surveys. He did little to change that impression by failing to exploit the platform provided to him.
'It should be of concern that some youth in Kashmir have started raising Daesh flags along with those of Pakistan.'
Macro data have little connect with indicators on the ground.
'Indian diplomacy is once again being saddled with the heavy burden of a Pakistan-centric foreign policy. It is something grossly unfair at a crucial juncture in India's trajectory as an emerging power on the global stage,' argues Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.
Even in this season of political-peeing-on-lampposts, Rahul Gandhi's statement takes the cake (with due apologies to another astute observer of poverty, the much late Mary Antoinette).
'Why should the accused in scams visit the CBI chief so frequently?'
The Planning Commission has not been central to the policy making process since the mid-1960s, says Nitin Desai.
'The Ishrat encounter was neither genuine, nor fake. I believe it was a 'controlled killing,' says Shekhar Gupta.
The need of the hour is not a divisive, slanging match of accusations and counter-accusations, but a call for sanity,' says Vivek Gumaste.
Rajan tells RBI colleagues he will be returning to academics
The text of the Income tax amendment is so wide and so riddled with ambiguities that it deserves to be scrapped for those reasons alone, says N S Nigam.
Toyota, M&M and Honda are making tough adjustments to their growth plans as uncertainty over diesel vehicles and fuel emission norms rises
From 1952 to 1967, each of the three Lok Sabhas sat for an average of 600 days and more than 3,700 hours. In comparison, the 15th Lok Sabha -- from 2009 till 2013 -- has met for just 345 days and 1,331 hours, says Shreya Singh
Parekh said divestment can unlock huge funds.
The man who led this journey is 50-year-old Kalanithi Maran, chairman and managing director of the Sun Group.
'Gujarat should have been a breeze. But the Patidar agitation and economic uncertainty queered the pitch.' 'Yes, the BJP won and its rank-and-file will take great comfort in the assembly victory. But the leadership is taking stock for a very tricky set of elections coming up in 2018.'
Why did Modi bypass the Cabinet before he committed India to the Rafale deal?
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has positioned himself as a credible partner for Bangladesh. He has scored by getting West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee to travel with him to Dhaka, says Srinath Raghavan
The National Investigation Agency has accused the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad of planting evidence and coercing witnesses, but its own investigation is incomplete and leaves many questions unanswered.
What Shekhar Gupta would have really liked to know from Pranabda: Why did Sonia prefer Dr Singh to him as PM? Why did he deny finance first, why did he accept it 5 years later, and why did he make such a mess of it? How did he force Sonia to nominate him for President and not Hamid Ansari? And how does he justify that most toxic legacy -- the Vodafone tax amendment?
US Ambassador to India Richard Verma and Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia Nisha Biswal were among the top officials present at the base to receive Modi.
The argument that a Bharatiya Janata Party government has no business marking the 125th birth anniversary of Panditji makes little sense, says Virendra Kapoor
An entirely new lexicon of political jibes emerged during the elections
'What gives hope is that Modi's own leadership is vitally linked to his capacity to deliver on the economic front. Indeed, if he succeeds, India's foreign policies will have changed beyond recognition,' feels Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.
