-CNN-IBN Inside the crumbling housing estates of Shivaji Enclave, amid the boys playing cricket and housewives chatting from their balconies, winding staircases lead to places where lies a darker side to India's economic boom. Three months ago, police rescued Theresa Kerketa from one of these tiny two-roomed flats. For four years, she was kept here by a placement agency for domestic maids, in between stints as a virtual slave to Delhi's...

-The Indian Express The UPA’s cash transfer scheme — delivering over Rs.3.2 lakh crore in subsidies and welfare programmes to the poor, directly to their bank accounts — has raised fears in many quarters about the capacity of a rickety state apparatus to cope with messy implementation issues. Our collective self-confidence about being able to implement any new policy is so low today, we seem to be paralysed by the mere...

-NDTV Raipur: Chhattisgarh does not favour the Centre's plan to dole out subsidies to beneficiaries by direct cash transfer, the state's chief minister Raman Singh has told the Prime Minister. In a letter to Dr Manmohan Singh and Union Food Minister KV Thomas, the chief minister said limitations in banking and information technology would make it difficult for Chhattisgarh to implement the scheme. He said Public Distribution System (PDS) outlets were the most...

-The Times of India Houses built for the poor allotted to ineligible beneficiaries, diversion of over Rs 100 crore to unapproved ventures, and a huge lapse in completion of projects mark UPA's flagship programme for urban areas — the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM). The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India has found serious lacunae and irregularities in the implementation of JNNURM in a nationwide audit that was tabled...

-First Post If we are willing to believe the best practice examples of cash transfers from Brazil and Philippines, and trust the UPA on the fact that their cash-for-subsidy is going to be all hunky-dory, we also have a right to believe Sitaram Yechury’s concerns about the fancy plan. According to the CPM leader, the cash transfer is a ploy by the government to dismantle the PDS and systematically reduce subsidies. “This is...