-The Times of India NEW DELHI: BJP on Wednesday made a strong pitch for increasing the minimum pension to beneficiaries under the employees pension scheme (EPS) to Rs 3,000 per month and link it to the price index, against Rs 1,000 proposed by the government. "The BJP demands that the minimum pension under EPS 95 (EPF Pension) should be declared at Rs 3,000 per month and not at Rs 1,000 as government...

-Down to Earth Thousands of people working under NREGS bring a 38 km stream back from the dead in Uttar Pradesh Thirty nine-year-old Ram Ishwar gave up farming to pull a rickshaw outside the railway station in Uttar Pradesh's Fatehpur town. He says scarcity of water and a resultant increase in the cost of irrigation rendered farming unprofitable. Wheat production from his 0.4 hectare (ha) farmland shrank from one tonne to half...

-The Hindu     The political executive and the permanent executive should realise they are public servants first and work in harmony to achieve the constitutional objectives There is a need to arrest the ‘laal batti' [red beacon] culture in public governance. The Supreme Court of India has been delivering a variety of judgments on matters of public governance, and these have been the subject of debate and discussion. Some of these related to...

-The Hindu     To be able to deliver appropriate legal services to the rural and tribal communities, we need an alternative delivery system with a different model of legal service providers Delivery of legal services to the rich and the corporate class is organised not through individual lawyers but through a series of networked law firms. These firms employ hundreds of lawyers and domain experts all over the country to provide highly specialised...

-The Hindustan Times New Delhi: We had not yet recovered from the horror played out in Member of Parliament Dhananjay Singh's home in New Delhi's VIP enclave when another horrific case of maid abuse tumbled out from a middle-class neighbourhood in east Delhi last week. A 55-year-old Non-Resident Indian, in town to take care of her ailing mother, allegedly tortured her maid by branding her with hot kitchen tongs. A minor...