-The Times of India     NEW DELHI: The Delhi cabinet on Monday "formally approved" the inclusion of 40,000 additional beneficiaries in the old age pension scheme. The approval amounts to regularization of pensioners registered and in receiving financial assistance, even though they exist beyond the cap of 3.5 lakh permitted under the scheme of the social welfare department. The easing of the cap is to tide over a legal crisis and a face-saving exercise...

-The Business Standard Why government policy and jobless growth have let inequality worsen in recent times The Forbes list of billionaires features 55 Indians in 2013. The estimated net worth of only the top ten is $102.1 billion or approximately 5.5 per cent of India's gross domestic product. Paradoxically, every third poor person and every second malnourished child in the world is also an Indian. India also adds 7.5 million babies with...

-The Indian Express Kolkata: AMONG the 6.25 lakh complaints received by Justice Sen Commission, which has been set up by the West Bengal government to inquire into the Saradha Group and other chit fund scams and also to look into ways to return money to investors, many have been submitted by people from other states where the firms were operating. "Since the West Bengal government is the only state government that has...

-The Hindu   As TRAI prepares to regulate ownership of news organisations to ensure pluralism, big media houses fear shrinking profits and state control by proxy Rahul Khullar, the straight-talking chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), listened attentively to the senior management executive of Bennett Coleman and Co. LIMited, one of India's largest media conglomerates. The latter disagreed with the premise of the discussion - that there was a "problem,"...

-Frontline The Central government's proposal to hand over the supply of supplementary nutrition to NGOs in the name of "community participation" is surely an invitation for private profiteering on the back of this supposedly public scheme. ENSURING safe and healthy conditions for the reproduction of the population is obviously the most fundamental requirement of any society. So the progress of a society can be determined (and indeed is routinely judged) by the...