-The Times of India Crest Cash transfers have been described as the world's favourite new anti-poverty device. As India gets set to implement it, TOI-Crest finds out if the politics will ever be divorced from the cash The UPA government's ambitious plan to introduce direct cash transfers (DCT) by January 1, 2013 reflects both the political desperation of a beleaguered government and the urgent need to reform India's inefficient and corrupt public...

-The Times of India Government on Wednesday said that around seven crore people in the country were either unemployed or under-employed. "As per results of the latest survey conducted by the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) during 2009-10, the number of unemployed or under-employed persons on usual status basis in the country was 95 lakh and about six crore, respectively," the Union labour and employment minister Mallikarjun Kharge said in the Rajya...

-The Indian Express FDI in retail will bring competition to non-tradable services, and make Indian firms globally competitive India removed barriers to trade in goods in the 1990s. Removing protection brought global competition and raised productivity. But introducing global competition in services is harder. In certain services that are tradable, like legal or financial services, the removal of trade barriers can introduce competition and increase productivity. But these often involve complicated and...

-The Hindu Though more people in India are in the textile sector, than in any other of the economy, bar agriculture, hostile and indifferent government policies are giving it short shrift Handloom weavers from all over the country are on a 72-hour hunger strike at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi from today in protest against the government’s textile policy. The protest is led by Rastra Cheneta Jana Samakhya, the State Handloom Weavers’...

-The Hindu Rural newspaper Gaon Connection, recently launched in Uttar Pradesh, seeks to project the hinterland as it really is For long the national media has been accused of shutting its door on rural news. And by now, the largely city-centric media has won the argument too that news about villages and small towns just do not bring them the advertisers. So we are in an age when the ‘business of media’...