-The Times of India In a significant moment for UPA-II's plans to make cash transfers a reform motif and a pro-poor vote hook, Prime MinisterManmohan Singh and Congress chief Sonia Gandhi will hand out Aadhar number 21 crore in the Rajasthan village of Dudu on Saturday. Situated some 60-odd km from Jaipur, Dudu will be the stage for the launch of a scheme integrating benefits like rural employment guarantee, pensions and state...

-The Economist Growing inequality is one of the biggest social, economic and political challenges of our time. But it is not inevitable, says Zanny Minton Beddoes IN 1889, AT the height of America’s first Gilded Age, George Vanderbilt II, grandson of the original railway magnate, set out to build a country estate in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina. He hired the most prominent architect of the time, toured the chateaux...

-The Times of India The Centre on Thursday promised to notify a new drug pricing mechanism for essential medicines by the end of November, but the Supreme Court said a change in policy must not force a sharp rise in drug prices to hurt an already hassled common man. Additional solicitor general Siddharth Luthra informed a bench of Justices G S Singhvi and S J Mukhopadhaya that a Cabinet note on the...

-The Indian Express Surguja: One hundred and seventy-four children dead in 2010, 133 in 2011, 158 this year. In a region marked by gross poverty and hunger in north Chhattisgarh, those are the figures for just the Surguja district hospital, and for just the six months between April-September. Most of the children died of malnutrition and anaemia, most of them within the first month of their life. Surguja collector R Prasanna concedes...

-The Hindu Family’s economic condition, their willingness to allow the girl child to continue studying and the literacy status of the mother were found to be among the key determinates among educationally backward families in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand that prevented girls from getting secondary education. According to a study report “The state of the girl child in India-2012’’ released here on Tuesday by non-government organisation Plan India that looked at...