-The Business Standard   Study also says MGNREGA workers spent almost 21 minute less in collecting each payment made electronically compared with manual transfer Even as the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government has put on hold its ambitious unique identification (UID) code-linked cash transfer programme, a study by noted economists Karthik Muralidharan, Paul Niehaus and Sandip Sukhtankar shows that leakage of funds allocated for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA)...

-SocialProgressImperative.org The 2014 Social Progress Index reveals striking differences across countries in their social performance, highlights the very different strengths and weaknesses of individual countries, and provides concrete guidance for national policy agendas. The Index is the sum of three dimensions: Basic Human Needs, Foundations of Wellbeing, and Opportunity. Each dimension is made up of four equally weighted individual components scored on an objective scale from 0-100. This scale is determined by...

-Live Mint Data shows that Indian growth has moved in sync with what was happening in the rest of the world while Indian inflation has had a life of its own Mumbai: The war of words between P. Chidambaram and Yashwant Sinha on the way the Indian economy has been managed over the past decade is the sort of political grandstanding that is expected in the last stage of what has...

-The Hindustan Times If the opinion polls are to be believed, the UPA is facing a rout in the coming Lok Sabha elections. One explanation, popular in the media, goes something like this: The UPA faces voter wrath because it destroyed growth. The economy has paid a price for bad governance and expensive welfare schemes. If you look at data for the last two years, this view will find some support....

-The Indian Express Data shows that the state is high on growth, low on development. What does this say about the government's priorities? No matter what the political leanings, many people have come to accept the premise that Gujarat has performed a lot better than the rest of India in terms of development over the last decade. People are even talking about the Gujarat model of development as something for the whole...