-The Times of India GWALIOR: Barely two weeks after he embarrassed BJP by saying the party lost Karnataka due to "opportunistic" politics, L K Advani sought to run down Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi suggesting his Madhya Pradesh counterpart Shivraj Singh Chouhan deserves more credit. Advani reiterated his argument that Chouhan's achievements rank higher as he is the CM of a "bimaru" (laggard) state, while Modi only improved economically well-off Gujarat. "He...

Argumentative Indians are at it again! After sparring over the poverty line and the actual number of poor, India's renowned economists have fired up a fresh debate over the extent of malnutrition. In the earlier debate, the Planning Commission ‘reduced' poverty on paper disregarding NSSO and official committees, including the NCEUS, which determined that 77% Indians survived on less than Rs 20 a day. Columbia university economist Arvind Panagariya has...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: In a significant sanitization exercise, the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has made changes in its history textbooks dropping "objectionable" references to the Nadar community, depiction of angels in human form and introducing more sensitive coinages to caste to smoothen ruffled feathers of political leaders. The changes have been made in history books of class VIII, IX, XI and XII that will...

-The Telegraph A village awaits doomsday By Jaideep Hardikar, Penguin, Rs 299 Why is the year, 2011, important? It is important for some states like West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, for it marked a change of government. But it is important, nationally, for the reason that 2011 was a census year. The data for Census 2011 has come, recently, into the public domain - which shows that our farmer population is shrinking....

-The Times of India New Delhi: The Delhi Lokayukta has indicted chief minister Sheila Dikshit for allegedly misusing public funds for an advertisement campaign in the run-up to the 2008 assembly polls. The ombudsman has recommended to the President of India to administer "caution" to the CM for the alleged misuse of funds and ask her to reimburse either herself or through her party a sum of Rs 11 crore as...