-Livemint.com Scheduled castes are the most backward, followed by scheduled tribes and other backward classes, shows NSSO data In October, a two-judge Supreme Court bench commented that “national Interest requires doing away with all forms of reservations in higher education”. The judges also expressed regret that “some privileges remained unchanged” even after 68 years of independence. Debate on reservations has always been of a polarizing nature in India and abroad. Arguments for...

-The Hindu Business Line And worse still, to favour urea producers over decontrolled fertiliser units in gas allocation, exacerbating the nutrient imbalance The manner in which gas is allocated within the fertiliser sector smacks of arbitrariness. The Centre gives a uniform subsidy to all manufacturers, including those of decontrolled complex fertilisers, under the Nutrient Based Scheme (NBS) . Why, then, does it use a different yardstick for allocation of gas to manufacturers of...

-The Indian Express "Why don't you people take credit of cleaning Delhi air? You could enumerate the steps to be taken and why you are asking the court to do it," the Supreme Court bench hearing the PIL said. A ban on registration of diesel SUVs and high-end vehicles with engine capacity of over 2000 cc for an initial period of three months, strict curbs on diesel vehicles which are over 10...

-The Hindu Chennai: Completely unprepared for disasters: the hospitals in Chennai — private as well as government — were particularly vulnerable, improvising solutions as the situation developed. As water levels rose, Chennai saw every single system associated with modern life abysmally fail —houses collapsed, roads caved in, communication networks went down, sewage pipelines were wrecked, and carcasses floated on roads. Patients in government and private hospitals across the city took a beating. Completely...

-The Indian Express   India’s poor are closely bunched up near the poverty line. This could make poverty alleviation more manageable.    A recent World Bank (WB) report brought out poverty ratios across countries. According to these estimates, poverty in India in 2011-12 could be as low as 12.4 per cent if we use “modified mixed reference period” (MMRP), in which there are three recall periods depending on the nature of items. This...