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The Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) has decided to share online scores of candidates taking competitive exams in order to boost hiring by the private sector. As per the government’s proposal, the scores of the candidates taking part in the competitive exams will be linked to the Integrated Information System for Public Recruitment Agencies, which will be a dedicated website being developed by the National Informatics Centre (NIC). The scores made available in the website will act as a useful database for other employers to identify good, employable candidates.  Under the proposal, the UPSC has decided  to disclose information such as  name, date of birth, category (whether SC, ST or physically handicapped) educational qualifications, total marks obtained in the written examination and interview, address, e-mail id and mobile numbers of those candidates who have reached the final stage of examination (interview) but were “not recommended” by the commission. As per ...

Don’t shut the door on diplomacy over China’s Belt and Road Initiative Three years after the plan for the Belt and Road Initiative (B&RI, formerly called the Silk Road Economic Belt or One Belt One Road) was announced, China has concluded the first Belt and Road Forum. While 130 countries participated, of which at least 68 are now part of the $900-billion infrastructure corridor project, India boycotted the event, making its concerns public hours before the forum commenced in Beijing. India's reservations, according to the carefully worded statement issued by the Ministry of External Affairs, are threefold. One, the B&RI’s flagship project is the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which includes projects in the Gilgit-Baltistan region, ignoring India’s “sovereignty and territorial integrity”. Two, the B&RI infrastructure project structure smacks of Chinese neo-colonialism, and could cause an “unsustainable debt burden for communities” with an adverse impact on the env...

The data set revision for the IIP and WPI reflects a macroeconomic resilience The latest revisions to the base year for the Index of Industrial Production and the Wholesale Price Index reveal an overall macroeconomic picture that is at once heartening, given the underlying resilience reflected in the data. IIP data founded on the new base year of 2011-12 show that industrial output has grown annually at an average pace of 3.82% over the last five fiscal years, with a 5% rate of growth in the 12 months ended March 2017. Contrast this with the 1.42% average pace based on the previous 2004-05 base year, with 2016-17 showing a paltry 0.7% expansion. It is clear that the change in the base year with accompanying changes to weights of the component sectors, and restructuring of the individual sectoral constituents have all helped signal industrial activity as having been far more robust over the entire time period than had been previously posited. The caveats and explanations too need to ...