-Reuters NEW DELHI/MUMBAI: India's fight against AIDS is being jeopardized by a cut in social spending by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government, with health workers being laid off and programmes to prevent the spread of the deadly disease curtailed. With about 2.1 million people infected with HIV in 2013, India has the most cases in the Asia-Pacific, according to the World Health Organization, but new infections have fallen more than 20 percent...

A long-pending demand of civil society activists and NGOs, who are campaigning for probity, accountability, and transparency in public life, is going to be fulfilled soon. A welcome move has been made by the Government to enumerate and publish data on crimes committed against media persons, Right to Information activists, and whistleblowers in the forthcoming edition of Crime in India, which is published annually by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB)...

-The Times of India JHANSI: Meet 'waterman cop' Mahendraa Modi, an additional director general of police, who was instrumental in cracking some very serious cases. But it is not his investigation acumen that made him famous. His passion for water conservation makes him different from other cops. Modi's efforts have brought a new ray of hope for the parched land of Bundelkhand. Taking the issue of water conservation seriously, he has created...

-The Indian Express Socio-Economic and Caste Census can help identify welfare beneficiaries without falling into a binary trap. The release earlier this month of the Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC) has been followed by much media analysis. Some have expressed scepticism about what it shows and others have treated it as yet another set of numbers on how many are poor in India. It has also been variously hailed as revolutionising benefit...

-The Economic Times MANDYA: A new breed of moneylenders has pushed farmers of moneyed Mandya district in Karnataka into an endless debt trap, leading to mounting suicides, even as the institutionalised credit system has failed them. The system is so well entrenched that the borrowers themselves are taking steps to protect the moneylenders from a government crackdown on the practice. Farmers — big, small and marginal — have taken loans from private...