-Livemint A study shows there has been considerable upward mobility among both the poor and vulnerable sections of the population One of the reasons for the drubbing given to the Congress in the recent national and state elections is the disenchantment of the so-called neo middle class with its policies. A recent World Bank paper (Addressing Inequality in South Asia by MartiN Rama, Tara Béteille, Yue Li, Pradeep K. Mitra and John...

-The Hindu On most days, Central government staff work for eight hours The occasional surprise checks by Union Ministers to see if government employees are reporting to work on time may not have brought in 100 per cent compliance, but employees aren't as late to office as widely perceived. The Hindu got exclusive access to one week of Central government attendance data, thanks to the first publicly available database of employees, and found...

-The Indian Express Year after year, Pratham's Annual Survey of Education Report, or ASER, tells us about children who go to school but can't read or do basic math. This year, as ASER volunteers fan out across 570 rural districts, Uma Vishnu visits a village iN Rampur, a district in UP with some of the worst learning levels in the country, to see what it is to read. Aao, padho." Kusum,...

-The Indian Express In a damning criticism of the UPA government's flagship rural job guarantee scheme, the Rural Development Ministry has said the scheme was reduced to "yet another government programme exploited for pure partisan purpose" and through which "participating agencies and individuals" seek "personal benefit". An internal note prepared by the office of the Rural Development Minister Nitin Gadkari has claimed MGNREGA has "earned quite a bad name" due to a...

-The New Minute We can wash and clean our vegetables plenty of times but that's not the right solution. The solution lies in our regulatory system. Pesticides are everywhere - whether it is their use in our farms or their prevalence in our plates. We have somehow convinced ourselves or have been convinced that if we set certain regulatory standards we can conveniently forget about the negative impacts of pesticides and continue...