-The Hindu Khunti (Jharkhand): On the night of April 30, worshippers in the Raja Rani temple in Naurhi village in Adki block near Ranchi were singing, chanting and celebrating the new temple in their village when a group of CPI (Maoists) entered the temple and shot Dilip Acharya, the oldest of the three brothers who built the temple, dead as he lay asleep on the floor. The men then addressed...

-The Hindustan Times Odisha's Kalahandi district - once the cause of global embarrassment for India due to its high number of starvation deaths - today stands tall with a five-fold increase in its rice production since 1999, figures reveal. The agriculture ministry's recent crop data ranks Kalahandi among the top 25 rice producing districts of India. The three-year average of its rice production ending 2010-11 was 468,000 tonnes, compared with a three-year...

-The Hindu Business Line It requires a change in mindset to reverse declining sex ratios. The state-wise child sex ratio (number of females per 1000 males in 0-6 years age group) in India during 2001-2011 declined except in Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Mizoram, Gujarat, and Tamil Nadu (see table). Interestingly, these are the same states that had recorded a significant fall in child sex ratio during 1991-2001. Adverse child sex ratio can have...

-Down to Earth The country's 76 million poor have been denied the right to claim subsidised foodgrain under public distribution system The government has denied 76 million people in the country eligible to access public distribution system (PDS) the benefits of the food security system. For the past 20 years, the government has not cared to refresh its data and has been distributing foodgrain according to the population figure of 1991. Worse, the...

-The Economic Times Arvind Panagariya, a professor of Indian economics at Columbia University, hits out at Nobel laureate and Harvard University professor Amartya Sen over his call to confront MPs with the "number of deaths" a delayed Food Security Bill can cause. The former chief economist at the Asian Development Bank counters Sen's argument that it is high social spending that has contributed to the economic growth of Asian economies such...