-The Indian Express Floods and water-logging show that urban planners have paid scant respect to hydrology Rains have been good this monsoon season so far. But instead of welcoming the bounty, urban India seems to be wallowing in misery. Guwahati is flooded. People in Delhi, Gurugram, Mumbai and Hyderabad are beset with water-logged streets and traffic snarls. Even half an hour of rainfall is enough to make a lot of places go...

-The Hindu We need to rethink social safety nets in India’s growing economy so that they can also focus on the accidents of life rather than solely on the accidents of birth. Sometimes the grand narratives of the Left and the Right do not seem to have any relationship with the lived experiences of ordinary Indians. For the past two decades, the Left has tried to expand social welfare programmes for the...

-The Hindu Business Line The Government has several short and long-term strategies to achieve self-sufficiency Who can deny that pulses are at the core of the average Indian diet? Therefore, the NDA government’s multi-pronged short-term and long-term strategies to meet the growing consumption of pulses in the country — from importing to increasing production through new technologies, and making cultivation attractive to farmers — is to be welcomed. In fact, pulses play...

-The Hindu Though most in both urban and rural areas primarily rely on buses for travel, other kinds of vehicles, like two-wheelers and cars, dominate. Buses (and trams) account for the bulk of the spending on travel in India, a sample survey conducted by the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) has revealed; yet buses constitute only a small fraction of the total number of vehicles on the roads. Though most people in...

-PTI New Delhi: An RBI survey has found that 30% ATMs of public sector banks and 10% belonging to private banks were non-functional due to technical snags and no cash, among other reasons. In a written reply to the Lok Sabha, minister of state for finance Santosh Kumar Gangwar said RBI has informed that it recently conducted a “representative sample survey” of about 4,000 ATMs situated in metro, semi-urban, urban and rural...