-Outlook Ranchi: CPI (M) General Secretary Prakash Karat today called for an immediate end to the "division" of people on the lines of below poverty line, above poverty line, and advocated for universal Public Distribution System (PDS). "Now the people are being divided and are given ration cards on the lines of BPL, APL and Antyodaya, which should be stopped immediately," Karat said at a meeting of the party's Sangharsh Sandesh Jatha...

-Outlook An international row over a ‘world record’ “It’s 120 per cent fake,” Professor Yuan Long Ping (82), hailed as the father of ‘hybrid rice’ in China, had fumed last week in reaction to the claim that five farmers from Bihar had all individually grown more rice per hectare than the ‘world record’ of 19.4 tonnes per hectare in China—the best figure being 22.4 ton­nes. He would believe the claim, he...

-The Hindu “The purpose of a Budget – and the job of a Finance Minister,” P. Chidambaram declared in his speech, “is to create the economic space and find the resources to achieve the socio economic objectives.” Now that the presentation of and the spate of initial responses to the budget are behind us, it may be appropriate to ask how far the Minister went in accomplishing his self-defined task. Mr. Chidambaram...

-The Business Standard FM allocates Rs 10,000 cr to implement the programme; this is apart from the usual food subsidy requirement of Rs 80,000 cr for the year The most ambitious social security programme of the government, the National Food Security Bill, got a leg-up in the 2013-14 Budget, with Finance Minister P Chidambaram allocating Rs 10,000 crore for implementing it. This allocation is over and above the usual food subsidy requirement of...

-The Asian Age Sonia Gandhi’s economic and political ideology may have apparently triumphed over that of Manmohan Singh. The neo-liberal finance minister Palaniappan Chidambaram may be conveying an impression that he’s turned socialist with a vengeance by increasing taxes on the rich in the run-up to the 16th general elections. But the truth is that Mr Chidambaram has made certain assumptions about subsidies, inflation and the expected growth of gross domestic product...