-The Hindu Business Line India can learn from Brazil’s Bolsa Familia and China’s Gansu Programme to make refinements to its MGNREGA scheme. The development experiences of Brazil, China and India provide a valuable opportunity to understand the relationship between growth and distribution over periods of high rates of growth. The growth story playing out in all the three emerging economies have resulted in large regional as well as spatial inequalities, between rural and...

-Tehelka Are we eating sugar which small kids are producing as bonded labour? FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD Mahendra Singh used to live with his parents and two siblings in the Jahangirpuri slum area of New Delhi until the morning he was abducted, trafficked and then callously ‘sold’ to a sugarcane farmer of Haryana’s Karnal district. Mahendra was made to work as a bonded labourer in the sugarcane fields for three-and-a-half long years, until he finally...

-The Telegraph Ten-year-old Ayush Chauhan was smart as well as lucky. The Class IV student gave a fictitious phone number to the three kidnappers who had dragged him into a car on a Ghaziabad street on May 11. As they kept trying the number to make a ransom call to his father, Ayush gave them the slip. Eighteen-day-old Saumya Lodi had no such luck when two masked men kidnapped her from her home...

-The Hindu Death toll in Uttarakhand alone is 28 After weeks of deficient monsoon in the northwestern region, the three Himalayan States of Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, as well as Uttar Pradesh, on Saturday faced cloudbursts, landslips and floods, causing at least 31 deaths. Authorities issued a flood alert as the level in the Chenab, Tawi, Ujh and Basantar rivers approached the danger mark in Jammu. In Himachal Pradesh, the police...

-The Times of India AHMEDABAD: A special SIT court on Monday sentenced 21 people to life imprisonment for attempt to murder and arson in the 2002 post-Godhra riot of Dipda Darwaza in which 11 Muslims were killed in Visnagar town of north Gujarat. All the victims belonged to the same family.  In addition to the 21 found guilty, M K Patel, the then police inspector of Visnagar and also the first investigator...