-The Business Standard The default approach to reform - minimalistic and confused - will lead India into crisis  It is encouraging that the Planning Commission has undertaken an innovative exercise in scenario building for the country as part of the Approach to the 12th Five-Year Plan. The results are available in a document titled “Scenarios: Shaping India’s Future”, which can be found on the Planning Commission’s website. The merit of the document...

-The Times of India SRINAGAR: Notwithstanding the improvement in the security situation in the Valley, Union home minister Sushil Kumar Shinde ruled out the revocation of the contentious Armed Forces Special Powers Act here on Sunday. The Act gives sweeping powers to the Army including to arrest without a warrant anyone who has committed offence or even suspected of having done so, and to enter any premise to make such arrests. Chief...

-The Economist A new form of radical centrist politics is needed to tackle inequality without hurting economic growth BY THE end of the 19th century, the first age of globalisation and a spate of new inventions had transformed the world economy. But the “Gilded Age” was also a famously unequal one, with America’s robber barons and Europe’s “Downton Abbey” classes amassing huge wealth: the concept of “conspicuous consumption” dates back to 1899....

-The Economist Growing inequality is one of the biggest social, economic and political challenges of our time. But it is not inevitable, says Zanny Minton Beddoes IN 1889, AT the height of America’s first Gilded Age, George Vanderbilt II, grandson of the original railway magnate, set out to build a country estate in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina. He hired the most prominent architect of the time, toured the chateaux...

-The Hindu If we are going to buy American, why not adopt the American way of giving local bodies the right to refuse entry to super stores in their area There is the United States of America and then there is the ‘idea’ of USA that exists in the minds of significant portions of the middle classes all across the globe. How this looks in real life varies slightly according to the...