-The Hindu   An improvement in sanitation and cleanliness will eliminate much of the difference in malnutrition between India and the rest of the world, and across Indian States Historically the greatest advances in longevity and mortality reduction have come not from treatment of individual disease but from public health. This includes modern drainage and sewerage systems (sewage treatment plants), drinking water systems that produce and deliver disease-free water and solid waste disposal...

-Tehelka Bureau Though well-meaning, the new Land Acquisition Act is far from being a perfect legislation. But the urgency to amend a law even before a real field test signals a larger agenda. By all counts, this was expected. Long before he became the BJP and subsequently the nation's chosen one, Narendra Modi had made it clear that his model of development gains from the ease of doing business. Then, days ahead...

-The Times of India Blog The presidential address to Parliament on June 9, 2014 had focussed nearly exclusively on projects and schemes, eschewing policy. Therefore, many had eagerly awaited the budget speech for a policy vision of the new government. Unfortunately, it too left observers guessing on whether the government would tackle tough reforms or rely principally on better implementation. Had this been the budget of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), arguably...

-The Hindu India also has the worst gender inequality in the region In the two decades since the early 1990s when India liberalised its economy, countries like Nepal and Bangladesh have improved their human development indicators at a faster clip than India. Though India ranks marginally higher than many of its South Asian neighbours in the 2014 UNDP Human Development Report released on Thursday, the country has fallen behind most of its immediate...

-Vikalp A remarkable feature of the first budget of the Modi government was that the numbers in it (see Table 1 for a summary) - of the revenues that are anticipated from different source, the expenditures allocated to different heads and the fiscal deficit which expresses the gap between the aggregates of these - were almost identical to those in the interim budget presented earlier in the year by the UPA...