-The Hindu Business Line   In much of the discussion on the turnaround after the Great Recession, attention has been focused on financial consolidation and the halting return to growth. Far less attention has been paid to the persistence of high and even rising unemployment and its sources. In the desperate search for evidence that the global recession has bottomed out and the recovery has arrived, the story told by the long-term trend...

-The Economic Times The revised, but not yet passed, National Food Security Bill (NFSB) represents a crucial political-economic approach to welfare. But how well do we understand the financial and, more importantly, distributional consequences of the revised Bill? Although the revised Bill is likely to simplify the identification of beneficiaries, financial implications will still be substantial. Calculating these implications must include not only the cost of food subsidy, but also additional costs...

-The Hindu   Top civil society bodies are challenging the government's ‘counter-affidavit' in the Paid News case which seeks to gut the Election Commission's powers In a major twist to the Ashok Chavan vs. Madhav Kinhalkar legal battle (more notorious as the "Paid News" scandal), leading civil society organisations and eminent individuals have approached the Supreme Court to implead themselves into the case. Their intervention application, moved by advocate Prashant Bhushan, minces no words...

-Live Mint Move could assume significance given the pressure facing a government battling a series of corruption allegations New Delhi: A parliamentary committee on Monday sought to make a case for controlling the media-both print and electronic-through a statutory regulator, a suggestion that could assume significance given the pressure facing a government battling a series of corruption allegations. The standing committee on information technology called for such a regulator on grounds that the...

-The Hindu The Supreme Court on Monday declined to stay a Gujarat High Court judgment upholding the constitutional validity of the Centre's scholarship scheme for minority students in the State. The High Court, in a majority decision in February, had rejected the Narendra Modi government's contention that the pre-matriculation scholarship scheme was discriminatory, and directed it to implement it. Justices P. Sathasivam and M.Y. Eqbal, while issuing notice on the government's appeal against...