-The Telegraph New Delhi: The National Commission for Minorities (NCM) chairperson, Wajahat Habibullah, today said he would urge the Prime Minister to ensure speedy rehabilitation of Muzaffarnagar riot victims at Monday's National Integration Council (NIC) meeting. "According to official figures, nearly 44,500 Muslims have been displaced from their villages and have taken shelter in nearby schools and mosques in Muslim-dominated villages. I will urge the Prime Minister to take up the matter...

-Kafila.org This fact-finding exercise was coordinated by the CENTRE FOR POLICY ANALYSIS. Team members were the human rights activist and former civil servant Harsh Mander; former Director-General of the Border Security Force, E N Rammohan; Professor Kamal Mitra Chenoy of Jawaharlal Nehru University; National Integration Council member John Dayal; senior journalist Sukumar Muralidharan and CPA Director and senior editor Seema Mustafa. Introduction and Overview The first impression of the Muzaffarnagar countryside, now green...

-The United Nations Global and national efforts to end preventable deaths of children under-five years of age saved some 90 million lives in the past two decades, but at the current rate, a universal promise to reduce child mortality by two-thirds by 2015 will not be reached, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) reported today. "Yes, we should celebrate the progress," said Anthony Lake, UNICEF Executive Director. "But how can we celebrate...

-The Telegraph Kolkata: The state government today set February 28 as the deadline for distributing Aadhaar cards among all Bengal residents, prompting many to wonder about the feasibility of covering over six crore people in little over five-and-a-half months. Providing Aadhaar numbers to all citizens above the age of five is the precursor to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's dream project of rolling out a direct benefit-transfer scheme, replacing the leak-prone subsidy system. The...

-The Economic Times In the leaky system of welfare delivery, databases are the newest valve that governments are installing to ensure that benefits reach those-and only those -they are intended for. Since December 2012, for instance, the government of Madhya Pradesh has been appending on to the Centre's Socio Economic and Caste Census a host of household-level data: bank account numbers, NREGA card numbers, welfare entitlements, land ownership, whether their house is...