-Reuters NEW DELHI: As Prime Minister Narendra Modi completes one year in office, his cuts in federal welfare spending on the poorest of India's 1.25 billion people are coming in for sharp criticism, including from within his cabinet. In a break with India's socialist past, Modi has saved money on federal social and subsidy expenditure and pumped it into an infrastructure stimulus he hopes will trigger a spurt in economic growth. The government...

-New York Times Blog There’s poor, and then there’s ultrapoor. The ultrapoor are almost always women and largely found in Africa, South Asia and to a lesser extent, parts of Latin America. They are most often rural. They work as maids or field laborers, often paid not with wages but in food scraps. They might have just one dress or sari, and must wash a part of it at a time...

-The Hindu Over 5,000 violations pertains to distracting ‘part-screen’ and ‘scrolling’ ads The Electronic Media Monitoring Centre (EMMC) of the Information and Broadcasting Ministry has reported 13,000 instances of violations of regulatory norms by television channels in 2013-14. These violations came to light after Guntur-based Edara Gopi Chand, an activist with Media-Watch India, waged a three-year battle to expose the poor regulation of content on India’s TV channels. Using the RTI Act, Mr....

-Hindustan Times India is the only country that still creates textiles coming from the genius of its master weavers. The world has lost the hand-weaving and loom process, along with all natural and organic processes of creating textiles. Mill-made fabrics and synthetics largely dominate fashion markets, with China as the main example. India’s handloom industry is not the basket case it is made out to be. Its market for both saris and...

-The New Indian Express KOTTAYAM: There is a sharp decline in money-borrowing from local money lenders and private lending institutions in Ernakulam since the commencement of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), says a study conducted by the School of International Relations and Politics (SIRP) at the Mahatma Gandhi University here. The MGNREG scheme has made headway in Ernakulam district, stresses the Impact Assessment Study conducted by the SIRP...