-The Times of India MUMBAI: India's middle class has seen new entrants. Pani puri vendors, dosa sellers, carpenters, welders, launderers, drivers and cable TV technicians have all pulled themselves out of the clutches of poverty and leapt into a section of the middle class — the bedrock of the economy. A paper titled 'The Rise of the New Middle Class and the Role of Offshoring of Services', co-authored by the head of...

-The Hindu Data from Gujarat show such atrocities impossibly make up 163% of the total number of crimes. Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Bihar lead the country in the number of cases registered of crimes against the Scheduled Castes, official data pertaining to 2013, 2014 and 2015 show. The National Commission for Scheduled Castes (NCSC) counts these States among those deserving special attention. While U.P. has witnessed a political war of words over an expelled...

-Business Standard The showers are expected to return over central and northern parts of India in the next few days, boosting kharif sowing which has already touched 70 million hectares New Delhi: India’s southwest monsoon showed some signs of abating and the rains during the week ended July 20 was seven per cent less than normal, but there was no break in sowing as farmers rushed to take advantage of the available...

-Down to Earth Severe dry spells in Indian forests have hit the livelihood of more than 100 million people. But India simply does not acknowledge this drought For more than five months, residents of Jabarra village have been foraging the forests for minor forest produce (MFP). The forest in Chhattisgarh’s Dhamtari district is abundant with more than 200 types of forest produce and the district is known as Asia’s biggest trading...

-Frontline The inability to resolve pressing problems with respect to the production, distribution and availability of food is one of the important failures of the entire economic reform process. IN the fateful month of July 1991, when the devaluation of the Indian rupee presaged the introduction of a whole series of liberalising economic reforms, agriculture was very far from the minds of most policymakers and commentators. The immediate focus was on...