What does it take to get the government to fight corruption? One answer could be: a medical facility with an air-conditioned Intensive Care Unit, a team of 60 doctors, a media centre, 1,300 toilets, seven large screens to pipe live action, television sets, and a storage facility of 100,000 litres of water. This is some of the infrastructure behind Baba Ramdev’s fast that starts on 4 June at New Delhi’s Ramlila grounds. Ramdev...

The current perception that cash transfers can replace public provision of basic goods and services and become a catch-all solution for poverty reduction is false. Where cash transfers have helped to reduce poverty, they have added to public provision, not replaced it. For crucial items like food, direct provision protects poor consumers from rising prices and is part of a broader strategy to ensure domestic supply. Problems like targeting errors...

-The Business Standard   Land acquisition for non-agricultural purposes is one of the oldest policy challenges that modern governments have faced. It is, therefore, not surprising that it has become a major political issue in India as urbanisation spreads, new industries grow and major infrastructure development takes place. To IMAgine that complex political challenges faced in widely varying agrarian, social and economic contexts can be suitably addressed by one common national...

Finally, gory pictorial warnings like that of rotting mouths, hanging gums and infected lungs, will appear on cigarette, bidi, cigar and smokeless or chewing tobacco packets from December 1. The Union health ministry issued the notification on Saturday after years of buckling to resistance from the all-powerful tobacco lobby. The latest notification contains a set of four pictures each of lung and oral cancer. The warnings, which will be rotated every two...

-The Telegraph   Packets of chewing tobacco sold across India after December 1, 2011 will have to show graphic IMAges portraying the disfiguring effects of oral cancer, but cigarette and bidi packets may show milder pictures, the Union health ministry said today. The health ministry has notified two new sets of pictorial warnings — harsher IMAges for packets of chewing tobacco — that will replace the existing pictures, scorpions on chewed tobacco...