-The Financial Express The Indian success story increasingly looks like a tale of naivety and optimistic complacency. The Indian success story increasingly looks like a tale of naivety and optimistic complacency, with the fantasy of ‘India Shining' obfuscating the reality of widespread deprivation. Despite rapid economic growth during the past decade, millions continue to live in poverty and hunger. The Indian government aims to address abject hunger and malnutrition with the National Food...

-The Business Standard Interim Budget's partiality to sports utility vehicles   The interim Budget's decision to cut the excise duty on sports utility vehicles, or SUVs, from 30 per cent to 24 per cent will certainly benefit car makers (they have already reduced their price tags), but it raises some pertinent questions. Last year, while presenting the Budget for 2013-14, Finance Minister P Chidambaram had raised the duty on SUVs from 27 per...

-The Hindu Proposing a new "empowerment line" that aims to measure the minimum economic cost for a household to fulfil eight most basic needs, a global research organisation has estimated that 680 million Indians, or 56 per cent of the population, lacks the means to meet their essential needs. Health care, drinking water and sanitation between them account for nearly 40 per cent of the gap between their current status and the...

-The Hindu Abitha, a Ph.D student at the IISc, has come up with Algiculture, a technique to grow paddy along with an oil-producing algae, helping farmers earn additional income Hyderabad: Good news for paddy farmers! They can now doubly benefit by growing an additional crop without incurring additional cost, apart from contributing to the nation's Fuel needs. A student of Ph.D at the Indian Institute of Sciences (IISc), Bangalore, has devised a technique...

-Outlook Following are the highlights of interim budget 2014-15: Income tax rates kept unchanged 10 pc surcharge on 'super-rich' having annual income above Rs 1 crore to continue 10 pc surcharge on domestic corporates with income of Rs 10 crore Foodgrain production estimated at 263 million tonnes in 2013-14 Fiscal deficit at 4.6 pc in 2013-14...