-The Hindu   Seventeen people have died and over nine lakh people have been affected in the nearly fortnight-long spell of rains in West Bengal. Ten districts have been affected by heavy floods, disaster Management Minister Javed Khan has said in the Assembly. He said that 25,750 mud houses have been damaged or washed away due to the rains caused by a depression. The districts affected were Malda, Murshidabad, Purba Medinipur, Howrah, North...

TODAY, India is considered around the world as a rapidly developing country posting economic growth rates of around 8-9 percent consistently over the last several years. Along with China, which is much further ahead, India is seen as a powerhouse of the global economy in the decades to come and already it is home to a very large number of dollar billionaires, perhaps the largest such number in Asia. In...

  Can we agree in this country on a floor of human dignity below which we will not allow any human being to fall? No child, woman or man in this land will sleep hungry. No person shall be forced to sleep under the open sky. No parent shall send their child out to work instead of to school. And no one shall die because they cannot afford the cost of...

-The Telegraph   Multiple landslides across West Sikkim last night triggered by torrential rain have killed 16 persons and cut off the inter-district road connectivity and power and water supply for more than 20 hours. The highest death toll was reported from Khurong Kewa Dara along the Pelling-Dentam road, 15km from Geyzing, the district headquarters of West Sikkim. A three-month-old baby was among the 14 people who were buried alive at Khurong...

-The Economic Times   All public data-from that on glacier meltdowns to monsoon charts to benami land--will be freely available at the click of a mouse with the launch of a national data portal next month. Modeled on US chief information officer Vivek Kundra's Data.gov.us project, the science and technology ministry's portal-- data.gov.in--aims to democratize data, and make the government more "open". "We plan to launch data.gov.in by next month. Once the National...