-The Financial Express In an article published in this newspaper on September 4, 2013, Surjit Bhalla takes us to task for critiquing his earlier estimates of the cost of the Food Security Bill. Bhalla asserted that subsidy expenditures would more than triple and the FSB would cost the government R3,14,000 crore annually or 3% of GDP. We argued that Bhalla was barking up the wrong tree and that the main things...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Monday dealt a crippling blow to UPA's showpiece Aadhaar scheme by ruling that it can only be issued to those with proven Indian nationality and cannot be mandatory for accessing public services and subsidies. "In the meanwhile, the Aadhaar card cannot be made mandatory. If anyone applies for Aadhaar card, then you have to verify whether he is a citizen of India...

-The Indian Express To address the crisis of rising unemployment, first fix labour laws. That there haven't been too many protests against the elevated levels of consumer price inflation for several years probably has to do with the number of jobs being created. While UPA 1 had a poor track record, and only 3 million new jobs were created between 2004-05 and 2009-10, National Sample Survey (NSS) data shows the situation improved...

-The Indian Express Pune: Setting up a central storage facility for pesticides and restricting their access could help in preventing pesticide-related suicides, claims a study funded by the World Health Organisation (WHO). The study published in the BMC public health journal on September 16 claimed that by setting up a central facility where each family had a locker to store their pesticides has the potential to reduce 295 suicides per one...

Bihar Government's programme of distributing bicycles to school girls may be a modest intervention but is leading to big changes. A new research-based paper, brought out in August 2013, corroborates the success of the programme and testifies that it is leading to improved school enrollment of girls and arresting their dropout rates (See links below to read full paper and earlier studies on the subject).   Based on econometric and statistical models,...