-Economic and Political Weekly   What explains the erosion of support for the ruling combine at a time of rising human development indices? Ten years is long enough for an elected government to lose public faith and the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) has done much, both in acts of omission and commission, to ensure a steady erosion of support among the electorate. Large-scale corruption, the incompetence of the government in handling many important...

-Live Mint   Rights laws offer an important lesson for the new government: you cannot legislate your way out of state failure It is well known that the Indian state suffers from a serious crisis of implementation capability. So deep is this crisis that it cannot even reliably perform the most routine tasks like moving money and getting employees to show up at work. So, it is hardly surprising that rights laws have...

-The Hindu     While the stagnation in women's ability to control their own fate is disappointing, some of the other gender indicators are downright alarming On International Women's Day, the Election Commission of India held a special campaign to bring women voters to the polls. Although men and women vote at a more or less similar rate in State elections, women are 6-8 percentage points behind in the Lok Sabha elections where national...

-The Business Standard Government slowness may have scuttled Aadhaar With the declaration that the chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India, Nandan Nilekani, will stand as a Congress candidate in the coming Lok Sabha elections from a constituency in Bangalore, attention has once again been focused on the Aadhaar project. Aadhaar is almost at its target of enrolling 600 million people nationwide; Mr Nilekani says that the UIDAI has now got...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Making the most of one last opportunity offered by the Election Commission to enrol themselves before the general elections, 74.56 lakh people turned out at 9.3 lakh polling stations across the country on March 9 to file their applications. EC sources said this is the highest number of Form 6, the application form an eligible voter is required to submit to be included in the rolls,...