-The Times of India If you have a kutcha house or have a tarpaulin to cover youself, the socio-caste survey will not consider you homeless. If a farmer has a hand-pump provided by the government or a kisan patra to take loans against that, the same BPL scheme could now disqualify him from a BPL card.  If a widow has a 16 year-old son, she may end up losing the BPL status...

Those who see a direct link between wage inflation and the employment guarantee scheme need to think again Rural wage rates have been rising at quite a fast rate in recent months. Farmers have been complaining about their inability to get cheap labour for their farms. Industry, too, has raised the alarm saying that this is squeezing their margins; higher rural wages mean fewer people are willing to work on construction...

What is our national aim? To my mind, our national aim must be to make India a highly prosperous country for its citizens, and for that it is necessary to have a high degree of industrialization.  Even setting up and running a single primary school requires a lot of money, e.g. for buying land, erecting the school building and providing for the recurrent expenditure for salaries of teachers, staff, etc. We...

-AP   As delegates gather in South Africa to plot the next big push against climate change, Western governments are saying it’s time to move beyond traditional distinctions between industrial and developing countries and get China and other growing economies to accept legally binding curbs on greenhouse gases. It will be a central theme for the 20,000 national officials, lobbyists, scientists and advocates gathering under U.N. auspices in the coastal city of Durban...

If the story earlier was that the number of Maoist-affected districts was increasing, that no longer seems to be true On the third anniversary of the attack on Mumbai, today, the success to celebrate on the internal security front may be far removed from Mumbai, and located in the jungles of the tribal heartland of eastern India. The killing on Thursday of Kishenji, ranked third in the hierarchy of the Maoists,...