-Live Mint The fundamental pathology of Indian policy is the overwhelming preference for subsidies over public goods One useful way to understand a fundamental flaw in policymaking in India since 2004 is to ask a rhetorical question: why is the ruling United Progressive Alliance aggressively pushing for a law guaranteeing the right to food rather than one for the right to clean drinking water? Take a look at the numbers. A February...

-The Hindustan Times   Indians lost valuables worth Rs. 35,257 crore to thieves, robbers and cheats in the past 10 years, reveal statistics of the National Crime Records Bureau for 2002-2011. That is equivalent to the Delhi government's annual budget or what it last year took to run the national rural employment guarantee scheme which benefited 4.8 crore households. The national average for recovery was just about 20% ( Rs. 7,953 crore) of the...

-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...

-Frontline Corruption tends to be greater in periods when there is a state-engineered redistribution of wealth in favour of a few at the explicit or implicit expense of the many. Liberalisation is one such period. IT cannot be verified and may not be true. But, the view that the record of graft and corruption during the two-term, nine-year rule of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) is the worst in India's post-Independence...

-The Hindu   The educational and economic development of Dalits is seen by the backward castes as a challenge to the social order, as recent incidents in Tamil Nadu show On the evening of November 7, 2012, a crowd numbering over 1000 people burst into three Dalit settlements in Dharmapuri, north-western Tamil Nadu, and laid them waste. Over a period of several hours, they looted, smashed and burned. Trees had been felled on...