-The Times of India With the state budget all set to be presented on July 12, TOI takes a hard look at the government's cheap rice scheme and its impact on politics and employment. Will cheap rice boil? Let's look at the math. Reducing the price from Rs 3 to Re 1 per kg will help a family save Rs 60 per month. Till now, poor families got rice from the Public Distribution...

-Outlook The legendary environmentalist and Chipko visionary on the recent floods in Uttarakhand In the more than eight decades of his existence, legendary environmentalist and Chipko visionary Sunderlal Bahuguna has never been witness to the kind of devastation that Uttarakhand has seen recently. In an interview, he explains why the government can no longer ignore the environmental concerns of the locals. * Tell us about your escape. We heard that you had...

-Governance Now A CAG report dated March 15, 2013 had found Uttarakhand sitting on a time bomb, with nearly zero disaster preparedness back in Sept 2012 when the nationwide performance audit was done. Will other states, marked equally poorly in the audit, sit up and smell the coffee? The massive disaster in Uttarakhand has brought to the fore not only the old debate of ecology versus development but also thrown up...

-The Hindu While the focus is on pilgrims, nobody is talking about the fate of boys and men who came from their villages in the Mandakini valley to earn during the yatri season It is one week since Uttarakhand's worst disaster in living memory. Flash floods resulting from extremely intense rainfall swept away mountainsides, villages and towns, thousands of people, animals, agricultural fields, irrigation canals, domestic water sources, dams, roads, bridges, and...

-The Telegraph Bengal - Defrauded Many households in Calcutta have a domestic help or a driver who has lost money by investing in Saradha schemes - a common thread that has spun a perception that the poor are the sole victims of the sham company. But Sudipta Sen's promise of high returns had blurred the divide between the haves and the have-nots as well as the educated and the uneducated. Travels across the semi-urban...