-Live Mint In the past year, ration cards are being replaced with smartcards that can track food doled out through the PDS system New Delhi: Mohanlal Kapoor, a street vendor in north India, holds a card entitling him to subsidized food for his wife and four children. To get supplies, the Kapoors must battle an estimated 15 million families in their state toting similar pieces of paper that they're not entitled...

-The Indian Express Mumbai: Admitting that charitable hospitals flout norms despite monitoring, the Maharashtra government will now set up and maintain an online real-time database in all such hospitals to make sure the indigent and economically backward citizens can avail of affordable medical services. Having issued a Government Resolution to this effect on October 22, the government will spend on setting up computer hardware and employ one 'Aarogya Mitra', under the Rajiv...

-Economic and Political Weekly   This article presents estimates of the impact of the public distribution system on rural poverty, using National Sample Survey data for 2009-10 and official poverty lines. At the all-India level, the PDS is estimated to reduce the poverty-gap index of rural poverty by 18% to 22%. The corresponding figures are much larger for states with a well-functioning PDS, e g, 61% to 83% in Tamil Nadu and...

-The Business Standard A recent academic paper on probability theory shows how beliefs are influenced by interpretations of data rather than the data itself Ever since Indira Gandhi turned it into a closely-held family company - and even more so since Sonia Gandhi turned it into a brain-dead dinosaur - one of the hallmarks of the Congress party is that it often ends up doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. Whether...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: It's official. This year's dengue outbreak in the country was the worst in at last six years, with 55,063 cases reported till October 28. According to health ministry data, the number of dengue cases has been steadily rising since 2008 - when the count was 12,561 -witnessing a dip only in 2011. The number of deaths due to the disease has increased from 80 in 2008...