-The Hindu Held to account by the Supreme Court, the Central government is using opaque methods to change the key provisions of the employment guarantee scheme and make it targeted instead of universal. There is a pithy saying in Hindi that the elephant has two sets of teeth, one for show and the other to eat. This seems an apt description of the approach of the Narendra Modi government towards the implementation...

-The Indian Express Farm incomes may not revive despite good monsoon. There are new challenges for policymakers. India’s per capita calorie demand has been falling for at least the last 30 years. Most people do a double-take when they hear that. One can’t debate the fact much: National Sample Surveys every five to seven years have documented this. What we can debate are the reasons behind this: In their 2009 paper Angus...

-The Hindu  The latest inflation readings based on the Wholesale Price Index and the Consumer Price Index are a cause for concern. While the annual gain in wholesale prices hit a 23-month high of 3.55 per cent in July, retail inflation quickened past the Centre’s new Monetary Policy Framework’s upper limit for tolerance to 6.07 per cent. Food costs — a key component in both indices — were the main culprit....

-The Hindu An online community is prodding women to adopt eco-friendly methods such as reusable cloth pads and menstrualcups and reverse the reliance on the feminine hygiene product Remember the popular sanitary napkin advertisement that urged menstruating women to “touch the pickle”? While ad campaigns in the 1990s had a role in breaking certain taboos around menstruation, they also pushed a whole generation of adolescents into adopting sanitary napkins. Sanitary waste has...

-Livemint.com The report also suggested revising pay under MGNREGS on the basis of Consumer Price Index for Rural (CPI-Rural) as the appropriate index New Delhi: The finance ministry has rejected a report by the rural development ministry, which recommended that wages under the national rural employment guarantee scheme (NREGS) be made equal to or higher than the minimum wage determined by state governments. The report prepared by a panel headed by S....