-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Centre plans to change the criteria for selecting the beneficiaries of its rural housing scheme for the poor, dropping the earlier poverty-list-based method for one that uses a points system based on the ongoing caste census. The government believes the proposed reform will achieve better targeting by including deserving families left out of the below-poverty-line (BPL) list, but critics feel it would leave a huge number of...

-The Asian Age The much-quoted sentence, "there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics", was attributed to the 19th century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli by American author Mark Twain. Although researchers could never find such a statement in any written work of Disraeli, the sentence gained universal popularity to signify how economists and other number-crunchers use the "persuasive power" of figures to make a political point or...

-Newsclick.in The government in India continues to kow-tow to corporate lobbies at the cost of the environment and public health including occupational health. While always an integral part of ruling class politics in India, as witnessed in the seemingly never-ending saga of the Bhopal Gas Disaster, this has reached new heights under the BJP government led by PM Narendra Modi which is rapidly dismantling even the already weak environmental regulatory structure....

-The Indian Express The way the graph moves tells the story of a public health disaster that has been allowed to happen: over the last 15 years, the fall and rise of the lethal, fine dust that clogs your lungs every day in the nation's capital. After the historic Supreme Court judgement in 1998 forced all public transport vehicles, an estimated 100,000, to switch to cleaner Compressed Natural Gas (CNG), the levels...

-Outlook The NDA seems bent on subverting the RTI Act. Is the slow dismembering of the CIC part of the plan? We Have No Recall For the first time since its inception, CIC's functions expropriated by the govt A search committee set up to appoint a new CIC chief says meeting details cannot be revealed; "highly confidential" RTI appeals pertaining to prime depts...