-The Indian Express Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has more than one reason to cheer the Raghuram Rajan committee report's ranking of states on composite development. Apart from being put close to the bottom of the ladder in the new index of underdevelopment, Bihar also scores near the top in "performance", that is, the reduction of underdevelopment - a most sensible parameter introduced in the report - far ahead of Narendra...

-The Hindu When a death sentence is given to satisfy the "collective conscience of the community," it raises troubling questions about the fairness of the trial The verdict of death for the bestial gang rape in Delhi last December is based on Supreme Court judgments, which stipulate that capital punishment will be imposed in "the rarest of rare" cases, where the community's "collective conscience is so shocked that it will expect the...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Over six lakh people could die if an earthquake of the intensity like the one that devastated Shillong in 1897 were to strike the Northeast today, says a preliminary study by the National Disaster Management Authority. These findings have prompted the NDMA to undertake a project, including a mega mock drill on how state and non-state agencies in the Northeast would respond in such a scenario. The NDMA had...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Monday forced the Centre to stop clinical trials of 162 new drugs or chemical entities which had been cleared by the expert committee for testing on human beings in India. A bench of Justices R M Lodha and Shiva Kirti Singh was about to pass an order restraining the Centre from going ahead with these clinical trials when additional solicitor general Sidharth...

-The Economic Times Nothing can be more ironic than to have food inflation at 18% (August 2013 over last August) in a country that takes pride in enacting the National Food Security Act (NFSA) and bestowing "the right to food" to 67% of its population by promising 5 kg cereals per capita per month (pcpm) at highly subsidised rates. Given that cereals consumption is 10.7 kg pcpm, people will have to face...