-The Indian Express Raipur: In May 2010, Hindi TV channel Sahara Samay presented a five-point proposal to the public relations department of the Chhattisgarh government about covering government activities during 2010-11: 1. Two-minute special package: Sahara Samay will show the package 15 times a day during news bulletins. It will contain “CM’s speeches, government policies, and special news related to various departments.” Cost: Rs 3.28 crore per year at Rs 3,000 per...

-The Hindustan Times The recent arrest of two young girls in Maharashtra - Shaheen Dhada and Rinu Srinivasan - for posting and liking a Facebook comment questioning the shutdown in Mumbai for Shiv Sena founder Bal Thackeray's funeral reminded me of an incident that happened a few years after Independence and Partition. It was 1952 and I was playing in a neighbourhood park when some children coerced me into telling them my name....

-CNN-IBN Inside the crumbling housing estates of Shivaji Enclave, amid the boys playing cricket and housewives chatting from their balconies, winding staircases lead to places where lies a darker side to India's economic boom. Three months ago, police rescued Theresa Kerketa from one of these tiny two-roomed flats. For four years, she was kept here by a placement agency for domestic maids, in between stints as a virtual slave to Delhi's...

-The Hindustan Times The Maharashtra chapter of the central government's flagship Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) has criticised the state government for lack of transparency in the contract allocation process, saying it was done to favour the same vested parties.   The principal adviser of the office of commissioner Biraj Patnaik, who drafted the reports, expressed the need for the institution of a Special Investigation Team to investigate the matter. Hindustan Times, on Saturday,...

-The Financial Express The massive scale and complexity of major subsidy schemes are likely to delay the ambitious plan of limiting state subsidy on food, fertiliser and petroleum products only to the poor by directly transferring cash to their bank accounts using a unique identity number (Aadhaar). While other cash payments like pension, scholarship, wage under rural job guarantee scheme can be transferred directly to the beneficiary’s bank account, it is difficult...