-The Indian Express Year on year from June to December, communal clashes more than treble. Patna: Bihar has seen 87 major and minor communal clashes between June and December 2013, over three times the 24 incidents during the corresponding period of 2012. This coincides with the split of the ruling JD(U) with the BJP, an alliance of 17 years, and comes after seven-and-a-half years without a single major communal clash. A monthly break-up...

A new report on India's housing sector confirms with facts and figures what has been suspected all along: that despite growing demand for affordable housing, supply side responses have been weak and sluggish. This means even though the housing sector can directly impact employment and income generation, and has multiple forward and backward linkages with various industries, it needs innovative ideas, pro-poor thinking and policy stimulus. (See link below for...

-The Hindu     Move to push this year's expenditure to next fiscal is intended to keep the fiscal deficit within target The Finance Minister of the next government post-elections will have to pay the price for the United Progressive Alliance's (UPA) subsidy and social spend. The Finance Ministry plans to book in next financial year, 2014-15, the expenditure that will be incurred on subsidies during the remaining months of the current fiscal (January-March). ...

-The Hindu "Make Pravasi Baratiya Divas more democratic, inclusive" Representatives of migrant, domestic worker and human rights organisations, besides trade unions, held a demonstration at Jantar Mantar here on Tuesday to demand that the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (PBD) be made more democratic, representative and inclusive. Stating that the PBD should be made a platform for discussing the problems of labour diaspora and that its agenda should include issues of migrant workers, the protestors...

-The Hindu India is the world's largest open air lavatory with over 620 million people practising open defecation in the country. Seeking to address this persisting problem, the UPA government has widened the scope of its flagship Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) to include works relating to rural sanitation in collaboration with the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyaan (NBA) Scheme. This interlinking is aimed at strengthening the base of rural...