-The Hindu Business Line Digital dreams are cheaper than a pot of drinking water in Tila Shahbazpur, near Delhi A Wi-Fi-enabled village with no potable water! Yes, this is Tila Shahbazpur, which was in the news a few months ago as the first village in Uttar Pradesh to get Wi-Fi connectivity. “While [Delhi Chief Minister Arvind] Kejriwal is yet to fulfil his promise, we have done it in no time,” boasted Samajwadi Party...

-The Indian Express Farmers say CM promised Rs 2,500 per tonne, but factories paying only Rs 700; govt orders probe. Bengaluru: On June 24, Ningegowda, 61, a differently abled sugarcane farmer from Mandya in south Karnataka, turned the standing sugarcane crop in his 18 gunta field (1 acre = 40 guntas) into his funeral pyre. Till then, only one other farmer’s suicide had been reported from the region since April this...

There is a class angle to farmers' suicide in India. Close to three-quarter of farmers who committed suicide in 2014 were small and marginal farmers. ‘Bankruptcy or indebtedness’ accounted for one-fifth of total farmers’ suicide during 2014. The report entitled Accidental Deaths & Suicides in India 2014 by the National Crime Records Bureau of Ministry of Home Affairs clarifies the doubt that indebtedness and bankruptcy were major causes of farmers' suicide,...

-Economic and Political Weekly This is not "big data" to be used to cut down welfare expenditure. It was the Ministry of Rural Development which, for close to five years beginning in 2010, designed, planned and oversaw the execution of the 2011 Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC), whose first batch of results were released earlier this month. Yet, it was somewhat unusual to see Union Minister for Finance, Arun Jaitley, rather...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: For 10 months, the Narendra Modi administration withheld from the public the findings of a study by India's government and Unicef that charts "unprecedented" improvement in child malnutrition over the past decade but shows Gujarat in an unflattering light. Under pressure after The Economist reported the findings a fortnight ago, the government last week released the national-level data from the Rapid Survey on Children. But it is still...