-The Economic Times Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has taken charge of the UPA's initiatives to directly transfer welfare benefits and subsidies into individual beneficiaries' bank accounts - a system that would plug the rampant leakages of funds earmarked for the poor via schemes such as NREGA on which the government spends over 3,00,000 crore annually. A new ministerial co-ordination committee under the PM would now fast-track the architecture for cash transfers while...

-Outlook Amid furore over FDI in multi-brand retail, the politicians and farmers in the leading agrarian state of Punjab are speaking in different voices over the issue. While Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal said the concept may be successful in developed countries like USA, he feared that it may not work in this country. "If the FDI comes, big players will eat into the share of small traders and that will be against...

-Bloomberg It wasn't the Gettsyburg Address -- unless it's poker faces we're comparing. Future historians aren't going to be parsing Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's speech for hidden meanings, and rhetoricians won't be delighting in the majesty of its style and the compression of its effects. It inflamed no passions, as did Mitt Romney's words about the "47 percent," and asserted no big idea or thesis, unless there was one contained in the...

-PTI The southwest monsoon that accounts for more than 70 per cent of the country’s annual rainfall is set to withdraw from northern and parts of western India in the next 48 hours. The monsoon has brought bountiful showers since August in a late rally that has cheered millions of farmers. This will be the seventh straight year when the withdrawal, which normally begins in the first week of September, has been delayed...

-Al Jazeera  Organic farming is the "only way to produce food" without harming the planet and people's health. Reports trying to create doubts about organic agriculture are suddenly flooding the media. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, people are fed up of the corporate assault of toxics and GMOs. Secondly, people are turning to organic agriculture and organic food as a way to end the toxic war against the earth and...