-Business Standard Reduction in leakages in the Public Distribution System (PDS) is driven by marked improvement in states such as Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Bihar, noted economist and former member of the National Advisory Council Jean Dreze has said in a recent report. In an email interview to Mayank Mishra, he said the National Food Security Act should bring the bulk of the population under a single category with clear entitlements. Edited...

-The Indian Express Recently, the Central government invited comments on its Draft National Health Policy (DNHP). The DNHP provides an exhaustive coverage of health issues and challenges facing this much neglected sector. Its major recommendations are making health a justiciable right and denial of care an offence; provisioning of health services through a strengthened public health delivery system in partnership with the private sector; enhancing public spending from the current level...

-IPS News NEW DELHI: Despite being one of the world's fastest expanding economies, projected to clock seven-percent GDP growth in 2017, India - a nation of 1.2 billion - is trailing behind on many vital social development indices while also hosting one-fourth of the world's poor. While the United Nations prepares to wrap up a decade-and-a-half of poverty alleviation efforts, framed through the lens of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), by the...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: India's plans to expand solar energy 30-fold to 100,000MW in seven years could create more than a million new jobs but demand chunks of land cumulatively larger than the metro areas of Calcutta or Delhi, an environment think-tank has said. An analysis by the Delhi-based Council on Energy Environment and Water has suggested that the plan to raise installed solar energy capacity from the current 3,000MW to 100,000MW...

-DNA Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, popularly knowns as NREGA, is the most romantic and largest development project in human history. It is extremely popular and invited widespread hatred. It embodies remarkable scope for alienated people and effortless corruption for powerful people at the lower level. The amount spent on it over the last nine years is about Rs3.50 lakh crore. The average number of jobs generated per year...