-Frontline     Attempts by the Congress-led UPA government to adopt the ordinance route to pass the Food Security Bill fail as the opposition parties are more or less united in seeking a Bill that provides universal PDS coverage. THE National Food Security Bill (NFSB), 2013, touted as the biggest game changer for the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government in the 2014 parliamentary elections, will go through yet another round of discussions...

-Live Mint The fundamental pathology of Indian policy is the overwhelming preference for subsidies over public goods One useful way to understand a fundamental flaw in policymaking in India since 2004 is to ask a rhetorical question: why is the ruling United Progressive Alliance aggressively pushing for a law guaranteeing the right to food rather than one for the right to clean drinking water? Take a look at the numbers. A February...

-The Hindu Developing and emerging economies may not exactly be dazzling in the current overall grim global economic climate of joblessness and sluggish growth. But the region has registered rising employment and narrowing income inequalities, relative to their rich counterparts, since the 2007-08 meltdown, says the International Labour Organisation's World of Work Report 2013. The backbone of this promising story are the middle income groups in these countries, which have...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The Nehru-Gandhi family, not surprisingly, emerges as the government's favourite when it comes to expenditure on newspaper advertisements on former leaders. Over the past five years, more than a third of UPA-2's spending on newspaper advertisements for birth and death anniversaries of former leaders has been on Rajiv Gandhi, Indira Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Of the total Rs 142.3 crore spent on newspaper advertisement on...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Marginal farmers in Maharashtra are battling another cruel drought. In Vidarbha, droughts have become an annual feature. Absence of irrigation and efficient watershed management make small farmers even more vulnerable. Although schemes such as the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), Swarnajayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana or the Indira Awaas Yojana are not viewed as adaptation policies, many agree they play an important role in making...