-The Hindu Providing people with a modest basic income instead of subsidies would save public revenue With oil prices falling, it was perhaps a good time to fade out fuel subsidies. All subsidies are inefficient and distortionary, and most are regressive. The same could be said of costly public works schemes as well. By contrast, the debate on direct benefit transfers has moved into a more sensible phase, with the posturing criticism of...

-The Hindu The failure of Narendra Modi's infrastructure plan reflects the larger failure of the Indian imagination, a mindless enumeration of ideas that have little or no bearing on Indian reality. When much of what is built is a half-baked imitation of disparate items tried and tested elsewhere, it becomes hard to fault Mr. Modi. If the recent image of Prime Minister Narendra Modi swinging on the jhula with Chinese President Xi...

-Tehelka Despite the serious toll it takes on women's health, female sterilisation remains the most prevalent form of contraception in India. While memories of the 21 months of Emergency in 1975-77, imposed by the then prime minister Indira Gandhi, survives even today in the minds of Indian men as the fear of forced sterilisation, the country's population control policies have shifted over the years since then to target the politically less...

-The Hindu   The central policy challenge for the new government is how to sustain social gains while ensuring that Dalits can participate more meaningfully in the economy, by sharing in the fruits of economic growth while contributing as well In his address to the nation on Independence Day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed his intention to "take a solemn pledge of working for... the welfare of the poor, oppressed, Dalits, the exploited...

-The Asian Age In India and around the world, poverty is predominantly rural. Development agencies often note that 75 per cent of the world's extremely poor people - those who earn less than $1.25 a day - live in rural areas. New figures from the 2014 Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), which measures overlapping dimensions of deprivation, show that rural poverty rates are even higher in some regions. In South Asia, the...