"The government has no right to ask citizens to keep on paying special taxes when it is getting richer by the day, and yet refuses even to measure its own performance transparently, leave alone guaranteeing outcomes."
Madhav Chavan, founder-director of education NGO Pratham, arguing for withdrawal of the 2 percent cess on all Central taxes for elementary education (Times of India, August 11)
"There’s a surge on the internet in new ways to parent an only child. That’s partly because more people are having them."
Andrea Peterson on the growing number of single-child families in the US (Mint, August 21)
"Even as democracy has become entrenched, membership of a political family is now accepted as the standard mechanism of advancement in New Delhi."
Patrick French, well-known author, on Indian democracy in Outlook (August 23)
"You might get monkeys if you pay peanuts, as the old saying has it, but no sum of money, however vast, is ever going to turn monkeys into men."
Well-known columnist Sunanda K. Datta-Ray on members of Parliament voting themselves a 500 percent salary increase (Business Standard, August 28)
"One of the most important success stories of China is the one least known and least emulated — its success in ramping up manufacturing in rural areas, drawing in hundreds of millions of Chinese into a globalised production supply chain."
Yasheng Huang, professor of political economy and international management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management (Forbes, August 27)
"In Congress-speak, (Narasimha) Rao has nothing to do with launching of India’s economic reforms that dismantled much of the dysfunctional licence-control-permit raj and planted the seeds of 9 percent growth."
Economist Omkar Goswami on how the Congress party routinely belittles the positive achievements of India’s former prime minister Narasimha Rao (Businessworld, August 30)