-GovernanceNow.com The cost of maintaining our 5.3 million stray cattle comes to about Rs 30,115 core per year A lot of debate that we witness in the media on the cattle question these days suffer from the disease of speculative utopian imagination of a ‘cow-nation’ and relentless abuses for those beef-eating ‘others’.   Political debates over the question of our bovine stock has mostly been heavily polarising and mindlessly simplistic, notwithstanding exceptions like veteran...

-Hindustan Times The Centre has renamed the Matritva Sahyog Yojana - a scheme under which pregnant and lactating mothers get Rs 6,000 for the first live birth - as Pradhan Mantri Matritva Vandana Yojana (PMMVY) in yet another instance of the Prime Minister’s name being prefixed to a government programme. Government sources said the name of the scheme, which was cleared by the Union cabinet last week, was changed to make it...

-The Hindu Reply to RTI appeal points to massive corruption in railways food procurement Mumbai: A recent application filed as a Second Appeal under the Right to Information (RTI) Act by an activist has revealed that the Central Railway's catering department purchased certain food items to stock their warehouses at several times the maximum retail price. After railway authorities failed to share information on purchase of food items sought in his RTI application,...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The RBI has said deposits of demonetised notes with a value of over Rs 5,000 would be allowed just once in a bank account between now and December 30. The announcement not only lengthened the list of abrupt changes enforced since the note recall was announced on November 8 but also fuelled suspicion that the government is trying to dissuade people from depositing demonetised notes. The value of such...

-The Hindu People migrating due to environmental disasters should be accorded ‘refugee’ status in international law An increasing number of people globally are facing displacement due to droughts, famines, rising sea levels and other natural disasters caused by climate change. This class of migrants has been labelled as ‘environmental refugees’ in popular literature. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, an international body reviewing trends of internal displacement, an estimated 24 million...