-The Business Standard The recent US-India friction over trade is being driven by Big Pharma Apart from the deterioration of the business environment generally, which impacts both domestic and foreign investors, retrospective taxation has figured most prominently in the media as the principal cause of growing scepticism among foreign investors. Entirely missing from the discourse has been an equally potent factor with wholly foreign origins: the hijacking of the economic policy...

-Live Mint Mint examines why millions of women are missing from farms, factories, colleges, and offices in India, which has one of the lowest ratios of working women in the world Mumbai: Every monsoon, minivans ferrying women labourers can be seen making their way from the small sleepy town of Wardha to Waifad village, 18 kilometres away. Urban workers from Wardha have come to occupy an integral part of Waifad's farm...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The UPA has hiked wages for national job scheme workers by 4-18 per cent in what appears to be a "parting gift" before the elections, but failed to match "arbitrary" revisions in minimum wages for agricultural labourers in 12 states, including Bengal. According to the new wage rates under the Mahatma Gandhi National Employment Guarantee Act, an MGNREGA labourer in Haryana will get Rs 236 a day, the...

-The Hindu Fifty centres to offer subsidised lunch to 300 persons each between 12 noon and 1 p.m. Hyderabad: The Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) on Sunday launched a pilot project offering hot and hygienic meals for the poor at Rs. 5 at Nampally Sarai close to the railway station. Earmarked budget A total of 50 such centres offering subsidised meals between 12 noon and 1 p.m. for 300 persons at each location were...

-The Hindu     As the people of India have been faced with a Parliament that has been deliberately non-functioning, they have no choice left but to demand that the President promulgate ordinances to bring in laws on which there was a clear consensus The demand for ordinances to be promulgated on consensus legislations such as the Grievance Redressal Bill, has to be seen in the context of the failure of the 15th Lok...