-The Times of India With finance minister P Chidambaram recently declaring at a full Planning Commission meeting that cash transfers may replace subsidies for food, fertilizers and fuel by the end of the 12th five-year Plan, the controversial proposal has again taken centre stage. A recently concluded pilot project which substituted ration cards with Rs 1,000 transferred monthly to families throws light on the pros and cons of the scheme. The study...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Car users can't be penalized for not switching to public transport system, Delhi high court observed on Monday while analyzing the effectiveness of the BRT corridor. "The policy shouldn't be such that you will be punished for doing something... that's not the way to encourage people to use public transport and discourage use of private vehicles," a division bench comprising Justice Pradeep Nandrajog and Justice Manmohan...

-Frontline Members of denotified, nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes, treated as criminal tribes by the colonial rulers, have no place to call their own and no land, no rights, and no support from the government.  Emaciated, eyes sunken deep into sockets, skin hanging loose, almost gasping for breath, Indro Devi and Sarvnath, a couple in their eighties, lie on polythene sheets in an 8×10 square-foot tent made of rags, by a stinking nullah...

-The Telegraph The human resource development ministry plans to sponsor a certain number of Indian students for PhD and MPhil courses in leading foreign universities every year. It has asked higher education regulator University Grants Commission (UGC) to work out details such as the number of students to be sponsored and the institutions with which the arrangement would be sought. “The focus may be on science and technology,” a ministry source said. The...

-The Telegraph The Planning Commission has proposed a separate quota for single women in central schemes instead of clubbing them under the larger “family” category as is done now. If the move is cleared, even women who have never married will be included under the head “single”, along with widows and divorcees. “Not much progress could be made in this direction (towards having a separate category). This can be attributed to two factors....