As the head of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) Government, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been caught like a doe between covert economics and overt populism. No surprise then that the Government chose to issue a press release with blank spaces, on the "marginal" hike effected on petrol, diesel and cooking gas. Clearly, the Government is finding it tough to do its math in a manner that it can convince consumers already hard hit by 8.1 per cent inflation. It has no qualms making the aam aadmi pay more for everything, rather than lose out on its own revenues.

The longevity of a banyan tree is often compared with at least seven life spans of a human being and hence women worship this tree for the well-being of their family, especially husband. These days, with more and more women working, there is no time to do the "pheras" around the banyan tree. Hence, small time vendors chop branches and sell them at the market which are bought by women and worshipped.

A week after fishermen complained of oil wastes polluting the Mahul creek and after the RPF police instructed Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd (BPCL) officials

P. Sainath The fertilizer shortage might even be overcome just now. But the crisis won't go away. It and many more to come are built into both, what's going on in world capitalism

In the last few months there have been more than a few instances of sparring between the different state governments and the central government. So, if the Jaipur blasts became a bone of political contention about crucial intelligence reports, West Bengal becomes an election battleground where the allies at the Centre took pot shots at each other over the bungling of land acquisition for industrial purposes.

Meena Menon MUMBAI: Farmers' agitation against shortage of fertilizers in Maharashtra resulted in traffic blockade on the Nagpur-Hyderabad highway on Saturday morning. The angry farmers, led by the Shiv Sena's Ramtek MP Prakash Jadhav, agitated for over an hour and burnt tyres. The State is admittedly facing a 60 per cent shortage of fertilizers and farmers in Vidharbha and Marathwada have been protesting for a while.

in the face of looming global food crisis, the Maharashtra government has decided to dispose of over 30,000 tonnes of imported red wheat saying that much of it is unfit for consumption. The

An 85-year-old lady was having problems getting her passport. She needed it to go and live with her children abroad. The status, the website showed, was delivered. Visits to the passport office

The Pune Municipal Corporation has confirmed that there has been an increase of 30 girls being registered at birth per 1,000 boys over the last five years. This reverses the downward slide of girls born per 1,000 boys as the number had dipped to 841 in 2002, making it a skewed sex ratio for the city.

Conceding that accidents on the Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS) route were taking place due to lack of proper road-crossing facilities for pedestrians, Municipal Commissioner Praveensinh Pardeshi at the general body meeting on Monday said that once the frequency of buses plying on the track increases to one bus every five minutes from the present 10-15 minutes, it would automatically deter other vehicles from using the BRTS route and pedestrians from carelessly crossing the roads. He also said that the BRTS pilot project would be completed by December.