-Livemint.com The trajectory of wealth concentration in the country, not just the levels of recently estimated inequality, is important A flurry of estimates regarding Indian inequality have captured public interest recently. Whether one believes the wealth inequality numbers presented by Credit Suisse or the distributional income accounts by Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty, evidence seems to state that India has high economic disparities. But inequality is to be expected in a developing...

-Hindustan Times New Delhi: The national capital is not “smart”, neither are financial capital Mumbai, information technology hub Bengaluru and eastern India’s biggest city Kolkata. They actually wallow at the bottom of a global livability survey of 181 cities. The 2016 Cities in Motion Index (CIMI), prepared jointly by the Barcelona-based University of Navarrara’s IESE Business School and the Centre for Globalisation and Strategy, found Indian cities floundering on most parameters that...

-Hindustan Times "Most of the movement in the World Press Freedom Index… is indicative of a climate of fear and tension combined with increasing control over newsrooms by governments and private-sector interests." - the RSF website India has ranked abysmally low at 133 among 180 countries in the latest annual World Press Freedom Index which says Prime Minister Narendra Modi seems “indifferent” to the threats against journalists. The rankings, which are released annually, are...

-Livemint.com The quality of output and influence in policymaking have been disappointing In order to give a flavour of how important think tanks in Washington DC have been to the policymakers, Peter W. Singer, an American political scientist, once wrote: “...when President Reagan took office in 1981, he quickly gave every member of his cabinet an 1,100-page book from the Heritage Foundation, Mandate for Leadership, that provided an outline for conservative principles...

-The Economic Times     There is a narrative that the UPA's rule at the Centre led to an economic disaster, especially in the second term. In contrast, Gujarat has prospered, thanks to Narendra Modi's good governance. We have several problems with this. First, through UPA's first term and about halfway into its second, many economic indicators critics like to harp on were much better than those during the NDA days. This is true...