-The Guardian Half of Indians have no toilet. It's one of many gigantic failures that have prompted Nobel prize-winning academic Amartya Sen to write a devastating critique of India's economic boom The roses are blooming at the window in the immaculately kept gardens of Trinity College, Cambridge and Amartya Sen is comfortably ensconced in a cream armchair facing shelves of his neatly catalogued writings. There are plenty of reasons for satisfaction...

-The New York Times Blog The right to food is finally becoming a lively political issue in India. Aware of the forthcoming national elections in 2014, political parties are competing to demonstrate - or at least proclaim - their commitment to food security. In a country where endemic undernutrition has been accepted for too long as natural, this is a breakthrough of sorts. The rhetoric, however, is not always matched by understanding...

-The Guardian A landmark bill to make the right to food a legal entitlement is mired in controversy over its failure to address a flawed public food distribution system, misplaced priorities and exclusions India has an over abundance of food grains stocked in warehouses, yet millions of India's poor are left without food. Development practitioners and NGOs are in favour of disbanding the current food security system, the public distribution system (PDS),...

-The Telegraph Kolkata: Two books by celebrated economists have set the stage for an absorbing growth battle. Columbia University professor Jagdish Bhagwati and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen want the same end - a better India - but the means they prescribe sound different. If Bhagwati prescribes economic growth led by the markets and overseen and encouraged by liberal state policies, Sen believes growth cannot be an end in itself without government effort to...

-The Hindustan Times Guwahati: Is it a coincidence that the militancy-mauled Northeast has had a large number of retired police, intelligence, army and paramilitary officers as governors? The first among them was general SM Shrinagesh, who took charge of undivided Assam in two phases, the first of which began in 1959. The separatism-troubled Naga Hills were then part of Assam. And now, former Delhi police commissioner KK Paul has replaced former BSF and...