-Hindustan Times The picture of rural Indian life today that emerges from what is probably the world's largest study ever of household deprivation is sobering and sombre. It describes a massive hinterland still imprisoned in persisting endemic impoverishment, want, illiteracy and indeed hopelessness. It tells a story that every thinking and caring Indian must heed. Advocates of free markets, opposed to building a welfare state, have long argued that accelerated market-led economic...

-The Times of India New Delhi: The Central Information Commission has directed the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) of Delhi to prepare a set of guidelines that needs to be followed before deleting names from the voters' list and inform the electors of the prosposed deletion giving opportunity to present their case. The Commission directed the CEO to pay a compensation of Rs 10,000 to one Sumit whose name was deleted from the...

-Livemint.com A simple but powerful case can be made that here is a comprehensive census which shows that the Indian farmer is entrenched in deep poverty The difference between a politician and a statesman is that a politician thinks about the next election while the statesman thinks about the next generation, said 19th century American author James Freeman Clarke. Reactions to the recently released Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC) only reaffirms this. Earlier...

-Hindustan Times The government has cleared a Rs 950-crore plan to untangle the Aadhaar-national population register jumble inherited from the UPA government. The census commissioner, tasked with creating NPR, will conduct a nationwide door-to-door survey over the next one year to link the population database with the 12-digit unique identification number, better known as Aadhaar. Home minister Rajnath Singh approved the plan in June-end, sources said. At each stop, enumerators — who will...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: A new survey has shown that one in every two rural households is eligible for targeted government aid - a significant jump from two earlier estimates of those entitled to blanket benefits. The provisional socio-economic and caste census (SECC) data released by finance minister Arun Jaitley show that almost half the 17.91-crore households in rural India may be considered under various targeted welfare schemes, depending on their specific...