-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: What happens when academic rivalry spills over into the political arena? A riveting contest ensues, if the one being played out in the run-up to the general elections along with the Narendra Modi-Nitish Kumar showdown is any indication. While the Jagdish Bhagwati-Arvind Panagariya combo - both professors of economics at Columbia University - are packing a fair punch, Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen is ducking and dodging,...

-The Times of India LUCKNOW: For the Akhilesh Yadav government, the burgeoning unemployment problem comes as a daunting challenge. The 66th round of the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) report puts the projection of unemployed youth in Uttar Pradesh in the age group of 15-35 at whopping 1 crore by the end of the ongoing 12th Five Year Plan (2012-17). They will be in addition to the backlog of around 32...

-The Business Standard Food insecurity and hunger are rooted in bad policies, faulty design, poor governance and a lack of political will According to the latest Global Hunger Report, India continues to be in the category of those nations where hunger is "alarming". What is worse, despite high growth, the hunger index in India between 1996 and 2011 has gone up from 22.9 to 23.7. National Sample Survey Organisation data show that...

-Timescrest.com Three successive CAG reports warned the Uttarakhand govt about the consequences of multiple hydropower projects, and their unpreparedness in the face of disaster. The advice was ignored. With aim of turning Uttarakhand into Urja Pradesh, the state has committed to building 680 dams, currently in various stages of commissioning, construction and planning. The powers that be have expedited the clearances for these projects. However, when it came to the issue of credible...

-The Hindu While the focus is on pilgrims, nobody is talking about the fate of boys and men who came from their villages in the Mandakini valley to earn during the yatri season It is one week since Uttarakhand's worst disaster in living memory. Flash floods resulting from extremely intense rainfall swept away mountainsides, villages and towns, thousands of people, animals, agricultural fields, irrigation canals, domestic water sources, dams, roads, bridges, and...