-The Indian Express After tasting success with its free bicycle scheme for school-going girls, the Bihar government is planning a freebie in tune with the times - a tablet PC - ahead of the 2014 elections. While other state governments have so far targeted the student community with free laptops and tablets, the Nitish Kumar government is working on an ambitious Rs 8,000 crore scheme to provide tablets to digitally illiterate...

-Newsclick.in Caste discrimination percolates down to the food plates for Musahar community in Madhepura district of Bihar reports Neha Dixit "The mahant of the Shankar Math told me to stay away from ultra-Left people the day I questioned the Collector about the hunger deaths in my village," recounts Prabhansh Manjhi. Prabhansh is from the Musahaar community in Madhepura district of Bihar. Estimated to be 2.3 million in the country, they are Mahadalits, one...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Top-notch foreign universities are looking to set foot in India to do research but not to open degree programmes, a trend local academics allege is aimed at identifying and luring away Indian talent instead of grooming it. The latest to join the bandwagon is the University of Chicago. It today announced plans for an "India Centre" in Delhi that will start operating from March and look to start...

-The Hindu The huge deficit in blood availability outside urban centres must jolt the government into legalising unbanked blood supply Twenty-year-old Putul, living in a village 70 km from a district headquarters town in Chhattisgarh, had been in labour for two days and a night. It was her first pregnancy. In order to hasten labour, the local quack administered several injections that increased her uterine contractions. Forty hours after the onset of...

-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...