-Business Standard The World Bank's latest report "Mind, Society and Behaviour" calls for re-designing development policy based on a more realistic understanding of how human beings think and behave. The lead author of the report, Varun Gauri, was in New Delhi and spoke to Anjuli Bhargava on the thinking behind the report and what India can do with it. Edited excerpts: * Right from the cover design to the title, this report...

-The Telegraph Ahmedabad: If "pay and use" toilets can't slay the demon of open defecation, perhaps "get paid for not using" will. So believes the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation, which plans to shame the city's dump-it-in-the-open brigade by catching them in the act every morning and paying them Re 1 on the spot. Will this not be an incentive for the offenders to stick to the old habit rather than shed it? Civic health...

-Tehelka The country has egg on its face but not in its diet, as the Global Hunger Index reveals acute malnutrition Swachh Bharat Mission, if implemented in a holistic fashion, holds the key to curbing not only the problem of diarrhoeal deaths for which India holds the world record, but also malnutrition. However, the World Toilet Summit, which was held in the national capital this year as part of the Mission, was...

-Economic and Political Weekly A categorical distinction is facing rough weather--that between urban and rural. If we take just agriculture, there is so much of the outside world that comes in not just as external markets but as external inputs. Further, many of our villages barely qualify as rural if we were to take occupation alone. So the earlier line that separated the farmer from the worker in towns is slowly...

-The Indian Express To improve the educational status of Scheduled Castes, a fresh understanding of their achievements and challenges is necessary. The concern of scholars, planners and policymakers has been to achieve the goals set in our Constitution: equality, justice and equal opportunity for all. However, in the period after Independence, it was revealed that education was not necessarily linked to social and economic development and the majority of Indians continued...