-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Supreme Court today expressed serious concern over some states' insistence on Aadhaar cards to extend social welfare schemes and other common services to citizens despite its two interim orders that the card should not be made mandatory until the court has decided its constitutional validity. A three-judge bench of Justices J. Chelameshwar, S.A. Bobde and C. Nagappan asked attorney-general Mukul Rohatgi to report to it by tomorrow...

-The Indian Express Response to the crisis of farmer suicides is narrowly focused. Poor health accounts for most suicides, necessitating improved access to healthcare rather than special packages For over a decade, farmer suicides in India has been a serious public policy concern. More recently, this has led to a shrill media outcry and much politicking. The government response to the crisis of farmer suicide has mostly been simplistic and sometimes aggravating....

-Down to Earth Centres that host most of these vulnerable kids need immediate attention Every fourth child in India lives in urban areas. Also, in comparison to 2001, the number of children (0-6) in urban areas has increased by 10.3 per cent while in rural areas it has decreased by 7 per cent. According to a report, released by Save The Children, an international non-governmental organisation, in collaboration with research firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC),...

There is a class angle to farmers' suicide in India. Close to three-quarter of farmers who committed suicide in 2014 were small and marginal farmers. ‘Bankruptcy or indebtedness’ accounted for one-fifth of total farmers’ suicide during 2014. The report entitled Accidental Deaths & Suicides in India 2014 by the National Crime Records Bureau of Ministry of Home Affairs clarifies the doubt that indebtedness and bankruptcy were major causes of farmers' suicide,...

-Economic and Political Weekly This is not "big data" to be used to cut down welfare expenditure. It was the Ministry of Rural Development which, for close to five years beginning in 2010, designed, planned and oversaw the execution of the 2011 Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC), whose first batch of results were released earlier this month. Yet, it was somewhat unusual to see Union Minister for Finance, Arun Jaitley, rather...