-Livemint.com/ Bloomberg To join the global middle class, India must do much better Max Roser is at it again. The Oxford professor and master of economic data visualization has a new set of maps and charts showing how global income and inequality have changed during the last couple of centuries. The upshot is that while the world has gotten steadily richer that entire time, something very special and very good has...

-The Indian Express Punjab is a case study in agricultural and economic mismanagement in India From the breadbasket of India, Punjab has become a basket-case economy. Endowed with ample water and good soil, Punjab’s happy, progressive people had a dream that is now a distant memory. Punjab’s decline started with its trifurcation. In its bid to establish a separate identity, the poli-tical establishment obsessed over a religious-political agenda and steered the state...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The Centre on Monday told the Supreme Court that it would soon join hands with West Bengal, Karnataka, Assam and Tamil Nadu to seek review of its May 13 judgment banning photos of political leaders, except President, prime minister and Chief Justice of India, in government advertisements. In an affidavit filed before the court denying any violation of the May 13 judgment, the information and broadcasting...

-DNA Wondering about the plight of the rural population facing successive droughts which has to buy pulses, South Asia Network for Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP) laments how no benefit of the price hike is reaching actual pulse farmers. While most link the current tur (pigeon pea) dal crisis with raging market prices, storage issues, hoarding and economics, a new study highlighting the making of the crisis - by South Asia Network...

-The Indian Express There are certain issues, however, which need be addressed, to make sure that the information commission becomes fully autonomous and thus becomes a constitutional body. Celebrations for 10 years of democratic transparency, in the form of the Right to Information Act, are going on. What we have achieved as yet and what is still someway to go needs to be found out. The many scams, which have successfully helped...