-The Hindu The imposition of Aadhaar-based biometric authentication in the Public Distribution System threatens to disrupt recent progress with PDS reforms. It also deprives millions of people of essential food entitlements. India’s Public Distribution System (PDS) has improved steadily during the last 10 years. The system used to be most ineffective and corruption-ridden, with leakages of around 50 per cent at the national level, going up to 80 or 90 per cent...

-The Hindu If the data on juvenile crime are anything to go by, the annual reports of the National Crime Records Bureau cannot be taken at face value. The National Crime Records Bureau’s (NCRB) annual round-up of crime statistics has in recent years been the subject of extensive media coverage. The parsing of the official data, however, tends to be a superficial exercise, focussing on the big numbers instead of the minutiae. Numbers...

-The Times of India LUCKNOW: Seeing their child in tears each time an insulin pen pricks the belly isn't the only pain parents of a type-1 diabetic child have to go through. The cost associated with management of the disease hurts equally, if not more. A middle-income family spends an estimated 18% of family income on the disease. The findings are from a study conducted by the department of endocrinology at Sanjay...

-Livemint.com Except people in high-income countries, most of the world cannot afford the fruits and vegetables they need, according to Research in ‘Lancet’ New Delhi: Three in four Indians are yet to taste the fruits of economic growth—or indeed, its veggies. Recent Research published in the British medical journal Lancet calculates fruit and vegetable intake among people of different countries, on the basis of gross national income per person. The Research finds that the...

-Hindustan Times Chandigarh: Thanks mainly to the largesse of 10,000 tubewells and mass switch from whitefly-shadowed cotton, Punjab’s paddy yield is going to be an all-time high of 186-lakh tonnes. What could be worse. The experts are worried that this non-native crop may bring “momentary respite” to farmers but “spell doom for Punjab”. Paddy — never grown over 30-lakh hectares or 94-lakh acres before — has eaten into the area of other...