-The Hindu Hard-working rig-operators are providing a real response to a very real demand from farmers, but with grave consequences for groundwater supplies No other town can boast as deep a connection with the rest of the country as this little one in Tamil Nadu. Machines from here have struck great depths in most Indian States (and in many African countries as well). Tiruchengode is the nation's borewell rig capital and thousands...

-The Indian Express Pandharpur: Jaya Waghela, 52, spends more than an hour cleaning herself every morning. But the soap and water cannot wash off the stench of human faeces she cleans everyday with her broom at 600-odd public toilets along the banks of the river Bhima in Pandharpur district of Maharashtra. "The stench is so overbearing that it has killed my appetite," says Waghela, who has stayed away from her kitchen since...

-The Hindu Growing number believe that the BJP is better at handling corruption Two out of three people feel that the UPA-2 is corrupt and that corruption has increased over the last four years, while a growing number believe that the BJP is better at handling corruption than the UPA, according to the CSDS poll. Even though corruption is only the fifth most important issue for voters in the 2014 elections, according to...

-The Hindu Development, price rise and jobs will be the overriding voter concerns in 2014 Lok Sabha poll Results from a nearly 20,000-strong opinion poll conducted by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) for CNN-IBN and The Hindu indicate that ‘development and the economy' and ‘price rise' will dominate voter concerns in 2014. Corruption comes in at a distant fifth, just half as important to voters as ‘development and...

-The Times of India There's a new trend of chief ministers, particularly those with national ambitions, aggressively peddling their respective 'development models'. Interestingly, CMs from the same party at times indulge in one-upmanship. The question is: How are people in their states actually faring? How does one know whether one 'model' is better than another? One way is to look at how much a person spends on an average every month;...