-The Hindu Held to account by the Supreme Court, the Central government is using opaque methods to change the key provisions of the employment guarantee scheme and make it targeted instead of universal. There is a pithy saying in Hindi that the elephant has two sets of teeth, one for show and the other to eat. This seems an apt description of the approach of the Narendra Modi government towards the implementation...

-Hindustan Times New Delhi: An inter-ministerial panel is likely to discuss on Tuesday a draft bill prepared by the consumer affairs ministry which seeks to punish celebrities who endorse products that are substandard or make misleading claims. The stringent provisions in the bill include a fine of Rs 10 lakh and jail of up to two years for a first offence by celebrities. For subsequent offences, the draft bill provides a fine...

-Frontline Medecins Sans Frontieres warns that the free or regional trade agreements that are being negotiated, which seek to strengthen current patent regimes, are a potential threat to the developing world’s access to life-saving drugs, which it sources mostly from India. WHEN NELSON MANDELA’S GOVERNMENT passed the Medicines and Related Substances Control Act in 1997 to make medicines more accessible to the poor, 39 big pharmaceutical companies filed law suits in...

-The Indian Express On Independence Day, we salute our freedom fighters. We also remember Lal Bahadur Shastri who gave us the slogan, jai jawan, jai kisan.   PM Modi needs to move from slogans to action to transform agriculture.   Atal Bihari Vajpayee expanded the slogan to jai jawan, jai kisan, jai vigyan. The present government has an array of slogans for the farmers. Prime Minister Modi has coined so many — swacchh bharat,...

-Business Standard Pulses acreage in the current Kharif season is almost 40 per cent more than last year and is even more than the average area covered in last five years The stupendous increase in sowing of pulses during the ongoing kharif season didn't escape Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s eye. During his Independence Day speech, the PM commended farmers for raising the area under pulses this season to almost 1.5 times more...