-The Indian Express India is at the point where a low income democracy cannot afford to ignore the hungry Is India's food security ordinance supportable? The debate has been vigorous. It will help to separate the questions of process from those of principle. Whether an ambitious scheme of this magnitude should have been brought in as an executive ordinance or as a new law after parliamentary debate, is basically a procedural question. It...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Even as the Election Commission plans consultations with political parties in the first week of August on a recent Supreme Court order seeking framing of guidelines for parties' poll manifestoes, senior commission officials are in a dilemma on how to define a "freebie" in the first place. The poll watchdog plans to sound out all recognized national and state parties in the first week of August...

-The Telegraph Has rape become an inspiring act? Protest, debate, anger, mutual blame, marches, mob violence are spilling out of streets and screens, yet the rape count continues to rise relentlessly, almost as if the outrage over one incident is inciting the next one. Such a narrative is to an extent encouraged by the way incidents are reported in newspapers and television, but the facts are inescapable, and everybody, including the...

-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: Its image pockmarked by a succession of corruption scandals involving the government, Congress has quietly launched a beauty parade of advertising agencies to pick the ones that will buff it up for the upcoming election season. Its single-point brief to the agencies: to play down corruption and hard sell its welfare credentials. Leaders in the Grand Old Party, which, according to insiders, has readied a war chest...

-The Hindu Uttarakhand reiterates that our rulers have contemptuous disregard for the advice of the best scientists and would rather listen to contractors and builders to whom they are beholden for funds In the early 1980s, while doing research on the environmental history of Uttarakhand, I sometimes visited the library of the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology in Dehradun. Most of the journals in the library dealt with geology and earth sciences,...