-The Business Standard Make schemes mobile and portable, by focusing on people and not products India spends close to four per cent of its GDP on an alphabet soup of welfare schemes and subsidies - it has become a welfare state before becoming a developed state. Despite its significant costs, India's welfare system is neither comprehensive nor very effective - subject to huge leakages and corruption, and not well knit into...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: After deregulating vegetables last month, Delhi government has now proposed to deregulate khoya and fodder mandis. Both wholesale markets have been suffering losses for the past several years and officials said, with rapid urbanization of Delhi, there is no large-scale farming or dairy activity within the city to sustain them. The wholesale fodder market is located in Mangolpuri's Tikri Kalam area. V P Rao, special secretary...

-Outlook Thiruvananthapuram: Kerala's women self-help group 'Kudumbashree' has sent 10,000 self-made sanitary napkins for women living in relief camps in flood-hit Jammu and Kashmir. Volunteers of Kudumbashree units in Kannur, Kochi and Kottayam toiled hard for three days to make the napkins within the short period of time for the flood-victims. The consignment has been sent to Kashmir, Kudumbashree Executive Director K B Valsalakumari told PTI here. The low-cost but high-quality Kudumbashree napkins, which...

-The Hindu ADILABAD (Telengana): With 40 suicides in 100 days, there is an urgent need for farmers to focus on other crops. The scale of finance for cotton is Rs. 24,000 per acre for un-irrigated crop while for red gram, black gram and green gram it is Rs. 11,000, Rs. 9,500 and Rs. 9,750 per acre. Adilabad seems to be holding onto to its position among the top ranking districts in the...

-The Telegraph Jaipur: Death owes this to the living. In this desert state, it is once more the great leveller. It needed a prod from a blindfolded lady with scales, but social workers say it's a big step forward towards ending years of caste-based discrimination that did not even spare the dead. Maybe, not much longer. Here's the story. The Jaipur Municipal Corporation (JMC) has "removed" signposts and covered boards at crematoriums that marked...