A new report on India's housing sector confirms with facts and figures what has been suspected all along: that despite growing demand for affordable housing, supply side responses have been weak and sluggish. This means even though the housing sector can directly impact employment and income generation, and has multiple forward and backward linkages with various industries, it needs innovative ideas, pro-poor thinking and policy stimulus. (See link below for...

-The Hoot We can either spend another year discovering how much the old model is disintegrating or we can explore alternatives. But India has not developed a tradition as yet of not-for-profit journalism, says SEVANTI NINAN. Two recent developments at the New York Times and at Time Inc. which publishes Time magazine underscore the fact that financing has and will remain become the number one issue for the future of journalism as...

-The New Indian Express   Most people would have been shocked to read the year-end report that India has been ranked 63rd, much below countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal, on the Global Hunger Index (GHI), a yardstick used by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) to comprehensively measure global hunger. The index is calculated as an average of three indices-undernourishment, underweight children and low child mortality rate-and is measured on a...

-PTI NEW DELHI: Apparently taking a leaf out of Aam Aadmi Party's strategy, the government is mulling a proposal to make it mandatory for Union ministries to elicit public opinion before framing legislations. To take the proposal forward, the Cabinet secretariat may convene a meeting of secretaries of the various ministries and departments before a final call is taken on it. "The proposal requires all central ministries to elicit public views on legislations...

-The Hindu Health officials on a mission to check illegal use of scanning machines under the Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (Regulation and prevention of misuse) Act 1994 Kochi (Kerala): Is there a potential link between the high number of scanning machines in the private medical institutions, many of them allegedly without proper records, and the dipping child sex ratio in Kerala? Since the health officials don't want to misread the situation, they have been...