-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Over 60% of houses in mid-size cities such as Moradabad, Gorakhpur, Kolhapur, Bilaspur and Kharagpur with less than one million population discharge waste water to the open drains, indicating how the government has a mammoth task in achieving complete sanitation even in urban areas. Nearly one-fourth of 416 such non-metropolitan cities have less than 20% households that have waste water outlets connected to the closed drainage...

The Skill India Mission was launched by the Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi on 15 July, 2015 with much fanfare. However, a new report from the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) informs us that among persons aged 15 years and above, only 2.4 percent had technical degrees, diplomas or certificates in 2011-12. Based on the 68th round of National Sample Survey (NSS), the report says that the proportion...

-The Indian Express An analysis of NCRB’s prison data of states with significant Muslim population also revealed that in some states the ratio of percentage of Muslim undertrials in jails to that of the population is almost 2:1. Muslims make up for over 21 per cent of all undertrials lodged in various jails in the country even as their population is just over 14 per cent of the country’s total population,...

-The Times of India India and her neighbors are going through a tortuous process of urbanization - slow, messy and partly hidden. This is seen in severe problems of livability and congestion, making cities unattractive for rural migrants. As a result, whatever benefits urban agglomerations could have offered in terms of economic advance are getting diluted. This is the dire analysis of a 200-page World Bank report on urbanization in South...

-Business World In the run up to Independence Day, Professor Ashok Gulati wrote a scathing critique of what he has described as “elitist biases in public policy”, that ignore the reality of the masses in rural areas. The reality he describes is that of low rates of growth in agriculture; a sector that majority of Indians still depend on.  He lamented the excessive preponderance of economic policy discourse in the country...