-The Times of India PATNA: The Bihar government, which keeps crying for more central assistance, could not spend Rs 1472.61 crore in 2012 and surrendered 100 per cent funds in 192 schemes, depriving the beneficiaries of the benefits, according to the CAG report for 2011-12 presented in state assembly on Tuesday. Central funds for several schemes also remained unutilized, it said. The CAG also regretted the lack of objective planning in utilization...

-The Hindustan Times The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Tuesday criticised the Delhi government's move of linking the monthly cash assistance doled out to Kashmiri migrants to Aadhaar cards and asked the authorities to reconsider its decision. The party's leader of opposition VK Malhotra, condemning the move, termed the "unjustified" decision as a ploy of the government to strip the migrants of their Kashmiri identity. "The Delhi government is trying to force the...

-The Indian Express   Lucknow: The Akhilesh Yadav government today launched the Dr Ram Manohar Lohia Gramin Awas Yojna by distributing cheques of the first instalment of financial assistance promised to the rural poor for constructing pucca houses under the scheme. According to the scheme, the state government will provide Rs 1 lakh to rural poor who do not own a pucca house. The state government will give an additional Rs 15,000...

-The Hindu Even as the Maharashtra government congratulated itself for addressing issues of the transgender population in a draft policy announced earlier this month, one of the provisions of the policy, which states people being transgender can be prevented through medical care, has angered the marginalised community. By this, the government has failed to acknowledge that being transgender is a choice of many people, the community's empathisers say. The draft of the...

-The Times of India MUMBAI: Summer may still be a couple of months away but in 3,905 villages in 12 districts of Marathwada and western Maharashtra, faced with one of the worst droughts since 1972, people have started migrating to Mumbai and neighbouring Gujarat, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. A high-ranking bureaucrat said situation in five districts—Ahmednagar, Aurangabad, Jalna, Beed and Osmanbad—is so bad that the existing drinking water will last only till...