-The Hindu Much like the space it aims to protect, India's cyber security policy, launched this week, is characterised by a striking duality of purpose. On the one hand, it seeks to guard, and thus strengthen, the country's strategic assets and online intelligence infrastructure. On the other, it hopes to secure the transactions of citizens, companies and public services on the web. The latter, more enabling goal is intended to...

-The Times of India With the state budget all set to be presented on July 12, TOI takes a hard look at the government's cheap rice scheme and its impact on politics and employment. Will cheap rice boil? Let's look at the math. Reducing the price from Rs 3 to Re 1 per kg will help a family save Rs 60 per month. Till now, poor families got rice from the Public Distribution...

-The Indian Express Why the proposed national minimum wage is the wrong answer to questions of unemployment and poverty The recent national labour conference - a trade union love fest with little real employer participation - demanded a national minimum wage. The trade union demand is a predictable positioning of narrow self-interest as national interest but the government's acceptance of their demand is unfair, delusional and economically stupid. Unfair, because it pampers a...

-The Hindu     The catastrophe in the Himalaya is the result of deforestation, unchecked construction of dwellings and large-scale building of big dams A week is a long time in the Himalaya. In the late 1980s, I visited Arunachal Pradesh as a young researcher, with a keen interest in photography. I walked into the middle of the Dibang river, hop skipping over boulders, until my local tribal guide ordered me to return immediately....

-Reuters India has launched a wide-ranging surveillance programme that will give its security agencies and even income tax officials the ability to tap directly into e-mails and phone calls without oversight by courts or parliament, several sources said. The expanded surveillance in the world's most populous democracy, which the government says will help safeguard national security, has alarmed privacy advocates at a time when allegations of massive US digital snooping beyond American...