Gurgaon-based Atul Sharma who works in a government office had been meaning to buy a second car for the household. Not wanting to spend on a new car, he decided to visit Mahindra First Choice, a multibrand dealership of pre-owned cars. A satisfied Sharma walked out of the showroom with a six-year-old, 40,000 km-travelled Santro Xing for Rs 2 lakh.

A grassroots revolution of politics that delivers is sweeping the Uttar Pradesh countryside. The newly-elected pradhan of Sarraiya-Mahantpur panchayat in Fazilpur, 29-year-old Rakesh Srivastava, epitomises this trend. He has taken it upon himself to empower the poverty-stricken area.

It's a forum where new parameters for leadership are calibrated as governance comes up for scrutiny. The Eighth India Today State of the States Conclave featured eight chief ministers, one deputy chief minister and three state ministers.

Union Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh is a man in a green hurry. On November 27, he dispatched a special official messenger from Delhi to serve a showcause notice to Lavasa City's promoters to stop construction for violating the Environment Act.

The 25,000-acre Lavasa in the Sahayadri mountains near Pune is independent India's first planned hill town.

The controversial Adarsh Housing Society at Colaba in Mumbai has lost its water and electricity supply after the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority revoked its No Objection Certificate (NOC) to the society. Whether it will lose 25 illegal floors out of its 31 is giving sleepless nights to the owners of the 107 flats.

In the last four years, the Arunachal Pradesh Government has signed over 150 Memorandums of Agreement (MoA) with hydro power developers to generate more than 63,000 MW of power over the next 10 years. But of the 121 MoAs signed till December 2009, only 14 have been allotted through competitive bidding.

Rankings are no pyramid; they are a ladder and there's room for only one at each rung. A historical advantage in infrastructure and its fields of gold may have kept Punjab on the top rung of the India Today State of the States study for long but Himachal has broken free to force a switch this year.

If you want to rank states, there are two broad roads to follow. First, you can administer questionnaires and respondents' reply to specific questions. This route, however, presumes that respondents know about all the states you wish to rank. Typically, that doesn't happen. Respondents know about states they operate in (or are located in). Second, you can use objective data.

When Ranbir Singh Butola took over as the managing director of ONGC Videsh Ltd (OVL) in 2004, the overseas subsidiary of Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC), his brief was to expand India's oil and gas footprint.

The neo-natal clinic at the government hospital in Mandya, 90 km from Bangalore, is surprisingly clean as ophthalmologist Anand Vinekar, 35, wheels in a Retcam, a cutting-edge diagnostic device the size of a television set. Vinekar then pulls out what looks like a hair dryer from the device.