-The Hindu In Bihar, ‘development’ comes laced with caste. For the upper castes, it is Modi’s pitch on investment that matters while for Backward Classes, Nitish’s social welfare agenda makes him a governance icon. The BJP, having no regional match for Nitish, has banked on Modi’s popularity. “Development” is a word that one encounters frequently across poll-bound Bihar, with people across caste lines using it to explain their political preferences. However, this...

-The Indian Express Indian healthcare providers need to get serious about infection control. A deadly strain of bacterium has doubled its resistance to last-resort antibiotics within a year, according to the report “State of the World’s Antibiotics, 2015”. By an estimate, antimicrobial resistance — the ability of bugs to outwit antibiotics — will claim two million lives in India by 2050, a fifth of the total. India is under pressure to curb...

-Frontline In Rajasthan, the abysmal state of school education has forced pupils, particularly girls, to come out in protest against the shortage of teachers and lack of infrastructure. IT was just over a year ago, on Gandhi Jayanti 2014, that girls of the senior secondary school of the town of Bhim in Rajasthan went on strike. The young, fresh-faced and neatly groomed girls were far removed from anyone’s idea of potentially rowdy...

-Livemint.com Cabinet reviews anti-hoarding measures taken by states, discusses ways to improve supplies and control spurt in prices New Delhi: With retail prices of pulses showing no signs of a climbdown, the Union cabinet on Wednesday reviewed anti-hoarding measures taken by states and discussed ways to improve supplies and control the spurt in prices. Later, finance minister Arun Jaitley chaired an inter-ministerial group meeting and said that at the centre’s insistence, states...

-Livemint.com More than 80 million people eat beef/buff in India, including 12.5 million Hindus The lynching of a Muslim man in Uttar Pradesh for allegedly storing and consuming beef a few weeks ago has sparked a heated debate about banning the meat. Predictably, battle lines have also been drawn around religious groups. But data from the latest National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) round shows that around 80 million people—around 1 of every...