-The Telegraph New Delhi: NDA-ruled states cannot "wait indefinitely for consensus" on amendments to the Centre's land bill and want to pass their own laws for smooth acquisitions, finance minister Arun Jaitley said today. Some lawyers said while many states have framed amended rules in the past, these were at variance but not in "complete contradiction" to the central land law. Jaitley was speaking after a meeting of the governing council of the...

-The Indian Express Reducing preventable disease should be a developmental priority. Government needs to invest in a healthier future. Indians are famous for our savings mentality. The 2014 Towers Watson Global Benefits Attitude Survey found that Indians had the second-highest savings rate, after the Chinese. We save for a variety of reasons, to create a safety net and to yield returns in future. While there is a time to save, there...

-The Times of India DELHI: Despite cases of intimidation of key witnesses being a routine, there is still no law in India on witness protection or to deal with threat to their life and otherwise from criminals and those in positions of power. Many witnesses died under mysterious circumstances in the Vyapam scam. In Asaram case, too several witnesses came under attack. Not long ago in the Jessica Lal murder case, several...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Landlessness and dependence on manual casual labour for a livelihood are key deprivations facing rural families, socio-economic census figures suggest. This, experts say, means they are far more vulnerable to impoverishment than indicated by a plain reading of the census data. While 48.5 per cent of all rural households are saddled with at least one deprivation indicator, the eye-opener is how much the other factors overlap with...

-The Indian Express The public health system is failing all stakeholders: practitioners, patients and their families. Doctors — or, more broadly, medical practitioners — are the most Important cogs in any health delivery system. They diagnose the sick, devise a course of treatment and follow it through, the lead problem-solvers, as it were. As a series in this newspaper has shown, however, doctors, particularly in the public health system, are overworked...