-Livemint.com Preference for government jobs is highest among college-educated rural youth, a segment seen at the forefront of recent agitations for quotas, shows analysis In one of the largest such exercises ever conducted in the world, millions of applicants are appearing this month for an online recruitment test conducted by the Indian Railways. The Railways Recruitment Board (RRB) has received more than 24 million applications for roughly 120,000 vacancies in the organization. Most...

-The Telegraph Economist who served as finance minister dies at 90 Calcutta: Former Bengal finance minister Ashok Mitra, who also served as the chief economic adviser to the Indian government, passed away in a city nursing home on Tuesday morning. The Marxist economist was 90 and had been suffering from age-related complications. His wife Gouri had died 10 years ago. An economist by training - with a PhD under Nobel laureate economist Jan Tinbergen -...

-CaravanMagazine.in Crimes against minorities in India, specifically Dalits and Muslims, have risen dramatically since the Bharatiya Janata Party government led by Narendra Modi came to power in 2014. A reasonable reaction to such hate crimes would have included increasing the allocation of funds to policing machinery at the local and state level. Instead, the Public Policy Research Centre, a BJP-affiliated think tank, had proposed that the state respond by shooting the...

-TheWeek.in Wilful defaults, loans which are deliberately not repaid by companies despite having the capacity to do so, have surged 152 per cent in the last four years of Modi government. A new report prepared by Pinkerton – a risk management consultancy along with PhD Chamber of Commerce and Industry – says that both gross NPAs and wilful defaults have been going up post 2008 financial crisis. The value of wilful defaults...

-Scroll.in The ‘Plastic Man of India’ has found a way to reuse plastic waste and to make durable roads. A 73-year-old retired chemistry professor from the Thiagarajar Engineering College in Madurai was on Thursday named as one of the 73 recipients of the Padma Shri, the government’s fourth highest civilian honour. Rajagopalan Vasudevan is known as the “Plastic Man of India” for devising an innovative way of disposing of plastic waste...