-The Times of India MUMBAI: On the eighth anniversary of India's landmark transparency legislation today, data mined on the Right to Information (RTI) Act shows it is, indeed, India's sunshine law, with an estimated 40 lakh people using the Act during 2011-12, the latest year for which all-India data is available. The Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI), an independent organisation closely associated with the RTI legislation, data-mined annual reports filed by the...

-The Hindu The role of education in reducing poverty is widely recognised but our planners are yet to realise how the impoverished struggle with a learning process that is unresponsive to their needs In a society where poverty is far more common than prosperity, one would expect the implications of poverty for education to be widely recognised. What we find, instead, is that poverty is seldom mentioned directly in policy documents on...

-Economic and Political Weekly   Much work remains to be done if the new Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act has to mark a meaningful shift for India's adivasi communities. Chitrangada Choudhury (chitrangada@csds.in) Chitrangada Choudhury (chitrangada@csds.in) is a multimedia journalist and researcher, and currently with the Publics and Policies program at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi. Among the worst excesses committed in India's six decade-old democracy, the forcible displacment...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Jupiter's gravity could be Rahul Gandhi's flourish, but "escape velocity" is a buzzword in macro economics and empowerment this year, figuring in the title of an influential paper by two Harvard economists studying racial inequality. In "Achieving escape velocity: Neighbourhood and school interventions to reduce persistent inequality", Harvard's Roland D Fryer and Lawrence F Katz examine policies that enable youth to "escape the gravitational pull of...

-The Economic Times It is ironical that food inflation surged to around 18% in August when agriculture is the primary hope in the economy. The culprit was mainly vegetables and, within that, onions. Onions are once again in the news due to steep rise in retail prices by almost 25% in a fortnight. Safal outlets in Delhi have set the price at Rs 60 per kg whereas some other retailers are charging...