-Frontline The Congress-led UPA seems to be betting heavily on the cash transfer scheme as a means to return to power in the next general elections. DECEMBER 2012 may go down in history as the month when the Congress party created its own “India Shining” moment: the moment when it started believing its own hype, and even deluded itself into thinking that its perception was so widely shared that it could provide...

-Governance Now Experts criticise CIC’s declaration that the attorney general is not a public authority, and thus cannot be under the ambit of RTI Act The chief information commission (CIC) might have struck another blow on the momentous Right to Information Act with its recent ruling that the attorney general (AG) is not bound to answer RTI queries. The declaration has drawn flak from RTI activists, experts and former information commissioners. According to the...

-The World Bank It is generally thought that two groups are the big winners of the past two decades of globalization: the very rich, and the middle classes of emerging market economies. The statistical evidence for this has been cobbled together from a number of disparate sources. The evidence includes high GDP growth in emerging market economies, strong income gains recorded for those at the top of the income pyramid in the...

-The Indian Express With less than a fortnight left to roll out its direct cash transfer scheme, the government is trying to fast-track the process of identification and registration of beneficiaries for the 34 schemes. Accordingly, it has decided to set up camps in each of the 43 districts where direct cash transfers would be launched for preparing a central database of beneficiaries, enrollment for Aadhaar numbers and opening of bank accounts. “A...

-The Hindu How gender sensitive are the government’s flagship programmes, probes a report to be released today Why is the concept of ‘citizen’ always a male? Why is the formulation of government policies always male centric leaving out the female counterpart that actually constitutes half the population and contributes in equal measure to the economy? Perhaps keeping this in mind, UN Women and economists have come up with a report on eight flagship...