-The Indian Express In Marathwada’s worst-hit districts of Beed, Osmanabad and Latur, households now have an uncompromising priority list of expenses as an economy hit by years of near-total crop failure goes into a tailspin. Beed/ Osmanabad: About 65 kilometres from the cracked earth that was once their source of income, Mandakini Mujmule, in her forties, and her daughter Anita, 21, have spent 16 days in Beed city’s government hospital. Mandakini has...

-The Tribune New Delhi: Top editors today engaged in an eclectic dialogue on the ills of Indian journalism after Vice-President Hamid Ansari listed their challenges in the times of “24X7 agitation of television news channels”. Addressing a seminar on the “Role of Editors in Today’s Media”, a Rajya Sabha TV initiative, Ansari lamented the decline of media ethics, recalling recent instances of some TV channels airing concocted content at the peak of...

-The Hindu We cannot permit gross inequality-linked deprivation to leave its malign signature on the lives of those who are yet to come. As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of the markets and financial speculation, and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution can be found for the world’s problems. Inequality is the root of social ills. —...

-The Hindu Despite a mountain of evidence testifying to the huge toll of suicide in our youth and the knowledge of effective interventions to prevent suicide, there remains no coordinated effort to address suicide as a public health issue in India. The recent suicides of three young women students in a medical college in Tamil Nadu citing the appalling conditions in their institution add to the mounting toll of suicides among young...

-The Indian Express The Labour Ministry’s four-year-old report acknowledged that for women, decent maternity leave alone “results in mounting a very huge pressure of family, childcare responsibilities as well as demands of workplace”. The Labour Ministry, on the recommendation of the Ministry of Women and Child Development, will amend the Maternity Benefit Act, 1961, to increase maternity leave in the private sector from 12 weeks to 26. This is being done...