-The Times of India Crest Cash transfers have been described as the world's favourite new anti-poverty device. As India gets set to implement it, TOI-Crest finds out if the politics will ever be divorced from the cash The UPA government's ambitious plan to introduce direct cash transfers (DCT) by January 1, 2013 reflects both the political desperation of a beleaguered government and the urgent need to reform India's inefficient and corrupt public...

-Pratirodh.com Biometric data based 12 digit Unique Identification (UID)-Aadhaar Number linked welfare schemes is being bulldozed with 2014 elections in mind with the ulterior motive of altering voting behavior of the citizens by creating a ‘universal identity infrastructure’ linked to ‘unified payment infrastructure’.   Ahead of next parliamentary elections, with the launch of 21st crore UID-Aadhaar Number and Aadhaar Enabled Service Delivery (AESD) on October 20, 2012 contemptuously ignores Parliament, Parliamentary Committee,...

-The Economist Growing inequality is one of the biggest social, economic and political challenges of our time. But it is not inevitable, says Zanny Minton Beddoes IN 1889, AT the height of America’s first Gilded Age, George Vanderbilt II, grandson of the original railway magnate, set out to build a country estate in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina. He hired the most prominent architect of the time, toured the chateaux...

-The Times of India   The Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed that the government had reasons to doubt its verdict laying down auction as the only way of allocating natural resources, in what is seen as an indication of a significant judicial rethink.  "On cancellation of spectrum licences allotted without following a transparent system, there is no doubt about its correctness. But if one reads the judgment to mean that auction must be...

-The Hindu With a dark and chilling feeling we recently read about the wrong Carlos who was executed in the United States for a crime he did not commit. An extraordinary investigation by a Columbia law professor and his team led to the revelation that due to a series of mistakes from investigation to trial, Texas executed Carlos De Luna for a crime committed by Carlos Hernandez. But it came too...