-The New Indian Express     Bangalore: As the battle for the Lok Sabha elections intensifies, the fight against the UPA government's pet Aadhaar project found support on Sunday as a group of academicians and technocrats spoke against the unique identification project in the city. The head of the project - Nandan Nilekani - is a technocrat himself and also the Congress candidate from Bangalore South constituency. In a discussion on the project, organised...

-IANS   About 36 percent of the children in Delhi are malnourished with a nutritional scheme targetted at the 0-6 age-group reaching only 30 percent of the intended beneficiaries, a report released Wednesday said. At 38 percent, the malnutritional rate is higher among girls than boys (34 percent). This means that four out of every 10 children in Delhi are malnourished. And, while the coverage of the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) scheme is already...

-Economic and Political Weekly   The long-standing debate on growth and development has been renewed in recent works of Jagdish Bhagwati and Amartya Sen. This paper intervenes in this debate with evidence from Tamil Nadu. Tamil Nadu, which, unlike Kerala, did not have initial advantages over Gujarat, outperforms the latter on nearly every development indicator at the level of indicators as well as in the rate of change. This is despite Gujarat...

-The Business Standard Since the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government decided to put on hold the Aadhaar-based subsidy transfer for domestic liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), questions have been raised about the future of one of Congress' most ambitious initiatives aimed at plugging leakages. Two months after the government move, a pioneering study by economists Karthik Muralidharan, Paul Niehaus and Sandip Sukhtankar showed leakages dropped 12 per cent when smart cards were...

-Live Mint Inefficient government relief is reason to allow access to alternatives The increased probability of an El Nino weather pattern has already begun to rustle up fears about how a bad monsoon could hurt a sluggish Indian economy. The concerns are valid even though the economy is less dependent on agriculture than before and reservoir levels this summer are quite comfortable. The lessons of previous El Nino episodes in 2002...