Census details for Delhi are out. From car-owning households to phone connections and Internet access, the city-state has seen all such “indicators of development” register robust growth between 2001 and 2011. And that is not surprising as everything has worked for Delhi to gain more than most other parts of country from India’s sweeping economic transformation over the past two decade. [Read more]

Last week, I was in Kolkata — my second visit since the state of Bengal embraced Parivartan in a historic election last May that ended 34 years of Left rule with a sweeping mandate for Mamata Banerjee. [Read more]

As the computer was taking time to open my bank account details, the customer care executive chose to chat up. “So you are from Orissa,” he guessed, and that’s not a difficult guess to make — mine is a surname that’s not common to any other state. “There are lots of Maoists there,” he said, as if there was no other description. Well, there has never been a description that has made me feel good about my state. [Read more]

I am not a big fan of cricket. I stopped following test cricket when I was in college — in the late 80s. The last one-dayer I watched was probably sometime in 2003 or 2004. [Read more]

One way of looking at the latest poverty estimates from the government is that the number of poor saw the biggest drop, falling by more than 7 percentage points between 2004-05 and 2009-10. [Read more]