-The Hindu Other States in India can study how the family planning programme has worked in Kerala and incorporate those features in their own programmes The recent tragedy of several women losing their lives in the state-sponsored tubectomy camp in Takhatpur, Chhattisgarh, has caused severe damage to the national family planning programme. This, however, is not an invalidation of the importance of sterilisation as an integral part of the programme, but only...

-Frontline The Left and other national parties protest against the NDA government's attempts to dilute the MGNREGS by limiting its budget and reducing its reach. IN a rare show of solidarity, representatives of several political parties took issue with the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government on its controversial proposal to restructure the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS). The opposition, which was initially confined to the...

-The Indian Express Prime Minister Narendra Modi has repeatedly promised India "maximum governance". But to get there, the high costs and ineffectiveness of frontline service providers need to be addressed. Take elementary school teachers, for instance. "Complete rest in comfortable conditions" is the description a rather candid elementary education cluster resource centre coordinator (CRCC) in Bihar gave his own job. And it's not just him, it is also how the CRCC describes...

-The Hindu To meet the fiscal deficit target for this year, the Central government is brutally slashing social sector allocations but is keeping expenditure cuts for the physical infrastructure sectors at a minimum. This re-aligning of plan outlays across sectors by the Finance Ministry is in line with the government's priorities. The Narendra Modi government views infrastructure spending as growth-enhancing and an essential element of its plans for reviving the economy. The...

-The Indian Express Eight years after the Sachar committee report on the condition of Muslims and creation of a Ministry of Minority Affairs, a post-Sachar evaluation committee, headed by former JNU professor Amitabh Kundu, has concluded that though a start has been made in addressing development deficits of the community, government interventions have not quite matched in scale the large numbers of the marginalised. Poverty levels among Muslims, the committee found, remained...