-The Indian Express Seeks 50% quota at all levels of legislature A high-level committee, constituted by the government to study the status of women to evolve policy interventions, wants the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) repealed, gay sex decriminalised and at least 50 per cent reservation for women at all levels of legislature, right up to Parliament. The High Level Committee on Status of Women was set up by the UPA government...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: For 10 months, the Narendra Modi administration withheld from the public the findings of a study by India's government and Unicef that charts "unprecedented" improvement in child malnutrition over the past decade but shows Gujarat in an unflattering light. Under pressure after The Economist reported the findings a fortnight ago, the government last week released the national-level data from the Rapid Survey on Children. But it is still...

-The Hindu Banks continue denying loans to low-income groups, insisting on sticking to a standard EMI route even though they are dealing with a complex social issue. In July 2012, Pradeep Kumar, a 36-year-old resident of Ladpur, a shanty town that sits on the north-western periphery of Delhi, applied for an employment loan at the magistrate’s office in Kanjawala district. Under the Pradhan Mantri Rozgar Yojana or PMRY — a funding policy...

-Business Standard Export to Iran might hit a record high Lifting of global economic sanctions on Iran could, it is hoped in the trade, enable a new record for basmati rice export to that country from here in 2015-16. Iran is also expected to cut import duty on Indian basmati from 40 per cent now to 20 per cent from the new season, starting October. Our basmati export was a record 1.44 million...

-The Hindu Chennai had the highest proportion of ‘severe’ days based on AQI Official air quality data for the first half of this year shows that while Delhi does indeed face high levels of air pollution, Kanpur, Varanasi and Chennai are worse off. Averaging across the ten pollution monitoring stations in the city, a little over a quarter of the days from January to June this year in Delhi had an Air Quality...