-Business Standard Back-to-back droughts and record-low farm commodity prices have forced the NDA government to look at MGNREGS in a new light.Things have started to look up for the scheme About a year back, Raqibul Hussain, Assam's rural development minister, was unhappy because he could not stop the Central government from lowering the state's annual entitlement under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme for 2014-15. This, he said in a day-long...

-The Hindu An all-woman team of reporters finds a massive online readership in the Bundelkhand region of northern India A homemade drone is shot down because the police think it belongs to the IS. A temple is built for a dacoit and his wife. A group of journalists are stalked for months until their story goes viral on the internet, after which a sleepy police station immediately swings into action. Reporting is...

-The Indian Express We have turned our back to the intense food and drinking water distress across states India has transformed spectacularly in innumerable ways in the last two decades. One of the least noted changes is in the way the country — governments, the press and people — respond to drought and food scarcities. Back in the late-1980s, many states across India were reeling under back-to-back droughts for three consecutive years, not...

-The Hindu Even as the student population has become increasingly diverse, the high incidence of suicide among Dalit students points to continuing discrimination, exclusion and humiliation. There is a need to apply our minds in a calm manner to address the problems that Dalit students face in institutions of higher education and find a more durable solution, now that the University of Hyderabad has revoked the suspension of students in the context...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Researchers have detected what they say are snapshots of an imminent invasion of northern India by Hinglish that is set to shrink populations of monolingual Hindi and bilingual Hindi-and-English speakers. A study that examined dialogue on the Hindi reality television show Bigg Boss and everyday language practices has suggested that speakers of Hinglish, the hybridised version of Hindi peppered with English vocabulary, could out number speakers fluent in...