-The Business Standard Since the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government decided to put on hold the Aadhaar-based subsidy transfer for domestic liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), questions have been raised about the future of one of Congress' most ambitious initiatives aimed at plugging leakages. Two months after the government move, a pioneering study by economists Karthik Muralidharan, Paul Niehaus and Sandip Sukhtankar showed leakages dropped 12 per cent when smart cards were...
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Funds dry up for drug discovery project -Rema Nagarajan
-The Times of India Funding for one of the foremost drug discovery projects in India came to an end on Monday as the financial year closed because the ministry of science and technology did not clear the cabinet note meant to extend funding for the project on time. The Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) project of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), meant to discover drugs for neglected diseases, had...
More »Music-making shells-Amrita Ghosh
-The Telegraph Bottle gourd shells, used to make traditional musical instruments like sitar and tanpura, are no longer grown by the farmers in Howrah, reports Amrita Ghosh West Bengal: Its not without reason that "shader lau..." is the most popular folk song in parts of rural Bengal, including Howrah. "Lau" or bottle gourd, as the folk song goes, turns a man into a vagrant as he eats its base and its top...
More »Why TB persists -Soumya Swaminathan
-The Indian Express Public and private efforts must converge to battle it. With two decades of high economic growth, India should have been on its way to controlling tuberculosis. Yet it remains an urgent public health problem. With 1,000 Indians dying every day of TB, and with the highest number of TB patients in the world, India is undoubtedly the crucial battleground for TB control. The enhanced detection of drug-resistant TB has...
More »Many realities, multiple platforms-Amit Baruah
-The Hindu The digital divide has gone out of favour, but millions of Indians not only remain illiterate, but are unable to access welfare schemes Is there a clash between social media and social movements? Or, can social media be used to promote social movements? As political parties intensify their use of social media and election fever heightens in a country where millions are illiterate and have little access to technology, these questions...
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