-The Indian Express Poorly designed policies are largely to blame for farm distress Successive governments have transformed an unevenly prosperous rural society to one which is evenly distressed. Small and marginal farmers now feel worse off than the landless. Most suicides have taken place in the families of such farmers, especially those with no source of non-farm income. For the sense of desperation that now pervades rural India, all political parties are...

-The Times of India BHUBANESWAR: The Orissa State Pollution Control Board on Sunday decided to seal 60 hotels in Puri for allegedly violating pollution norms laid down by the National Green Tribunal. OSPCB regional officer (Bhubaneswar) Hadibandhu Panigrahi said the board was asked by the NGT to slap closure notice on the hotels on May 5. "Despite repeated reminders, the hotels have not applied for the mandatory 'consent to operate' (CTO)," he...

-The Hindu For working India’s federal system, one has to go beyond brute parliamentary majorities and grapple with the multilevel government-opposition matrix, which is the architecture of Centre-State power-sharing Apart from the promise of providing a Congress-free India, the most frequent leitmotif of Mr. Modi’s electoral campaign was that he would usher in a new era for Indian federalism. Based on the idea that a state leader’s vision from below could transform...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: CPM general secretary Sitaram Yechury today wrote to the chief election commissioner, protesting against what he called the poll panel's drive to link Aadhaar numbers with electoral cards and voicing fears that the data collected could be misused. In his letter, Yechury said the commission had "clarified" through a press communiqué that Aadhaar card details were "voluntary and not a compulsory requirement for being enrolled on the voters...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Narendra Modi government has granted the military permission to test missiles targeting four ecologically fragile islands in the Andaman and Nicobar group in the Bay of Bengal, junking a UPA policy derisively known as "birds-over-bombs". The islands are uninhabited or largely uninhabited for most of the year, a source in the defence ministry claimed. Environmental organisations such as the Nature Conservation Foundation, Mysore, claim the islands are home...