-The Hindu Are differences within the middle class, in income, education, and cultural and social capital, so wide as to render moot any ideological or behavioural coherence to this group? The rapid growth of the Indian economy over the past three decades has led to a substantial expansion of India's "middle class". This has triggered a robust debate over who in India actually belongs to the "middle class," its size, composition, and...

-FirstPost.com Not all U-turns are bad. Some are good, like the one by the NDA government on the MNREGA, also called NREGA . For the uninitiated, the new NDA government had about three months back proposed to make changes to the pro-poor scheme launched by the erstwhile United Progressive Alliance. According to media reports that cited a circular, the proposal was to amend the NREG Act by restricting the area of work...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: A government panel that evaluated Muslims' post-Sachar socio-economic conditions has suggested an anti-discrimination law, targeted mainly at employers, to combat the growing disparity between the community and the rest of the country. The committee, headed by Jawaharlal Nehru University professor Amitabh Kundu, has failed to detect any "sea change on the ground" despite several welfare plans being launched for the community after Sachar's late-2006 report. Like Sachar, the Kundu...

-The Indian Express How many jobs must be created to realise our demographic dividend (or avoid a nightmare)? Half of India's population is below 25. The worst-case scenario is that enough jobs are not created for the millions entering the labour force each year, and that this semi-educated mass becomes a force driving social conflict. The reason that East Asian countries (especially China) rode the wave of the demographic dividend and dramatically...

-The Hindu The government must recognise the role low-cost health IT innovations could play in improving diagnostic accuracy, including many that would be useful for rural India The diagnosis of the first patient with Ebola in the U.S. was initially missed in an emergency room late night on September 25. Thomas Duncan, a Liberian national visiting Dallas, Texas, complained of flu-like symptoms and fever, but after lab work and CT scans, was...