-The Times of India The Cabinet on Thursday will consider a Bill providing for time-bound delivery of services like pensions, passports, caste certificates, ration cards and tax refunds with a penalty of Rs 250 a day subject to a maximum of Rs 50,000 for default. The right of citizens for time-bound delivery of goods and services and redressal of grievances Bill is to be enacted under the concurrent list, which means all...

-The Economist Government borrowing generates inflation, widens the external deficit and crowds out much-needed investment. Can India now overcome its debt addiction? INDIA has grappled with its public finances for long enough. When presenting its first budget after independence in 1947, the finance minister of the day insisted that the country was not living beyond its means. Yet every budget since has failed to produce a surplus. India borrows more heavily...

The total expenditure on central schemes for the poor and on the major subsidies exceeds the states' share of central taxes. These schemes are chronic bad performers due to a culture of immunity in public administration and weakened local governments. Arguing that the poor should be trusted to use these resources better than the state, a radical redirection with substantial direct transfers to individuals and complementary decentralisation to local governments...

-The World Bank It is generally thought that two groups are the big winners of the past two decades of globalization: the very rich, and the middle classes of emerging market economies. The statistical evidence for this has been cobbled together from a number of disparate sources. The evidence includes high GDP growth in emerging market economies, strong income gains recorded for those at the top of the income pyramid in the...

Should they be targeted? Should they go to individuals or households? Are conditionalities necessary? Without a full consideration of these issues, cash transfers will remain an expensive gamble Having worked on cash transfers for over 25 years, and being an economist, I find recent criticisms of the idea shrill and ill-informed. Only a right-wing ideologue would call them a panacea or a cure-all. They would merely be a vast improvement on...