-Tehelka The cash transfer debate has turned political with BJP complaining to the Election Commission about the timing of the announcement. It claims the scheme was declared with Gujarat polls in mind. However the Congress-LED Central government rubbished the allegation and said the announcement happened in March. Even the political slugfest continues, the debate among experts and activists hasn’t died down. Akshai Jain spoke to a few experts about the various...

-NDTV Manipur: At 4 pm on a sunny winter afternoon, a group of people are hard at work, trying literally to move mountains.   These are residents of Tamenlong district in Manipur; tired of years of being fobbed off by the government, they have decided to build for themselves a much needed main road to link the district to nearby towns of Assam and Nagaland. There are such few roads in this area that...

-First Post Predictably, the recommendation by an experts’ panel appointed by the Supreme Court  - that trials of genetically modified (GM) crops should be halted for 10 years – has stirred a hornet’s nest. Such a moratorium would include ongoing trials and the court rejected it. This follows on the heels of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Agriculture’s 492-page report published in August which asked for the banning of GM food crops...

-The Indian Express The UPA’s cash transfer scheme — delivering over Rs.3.2 lakh crore in subsidies and welfare programmes to the poor, directly to their bank accounts — has raised fears in many quarters about the capacity of a rickety state apparatus to cope with messy implementation issues. Our collective self-confidence about being able to implement any new policy is so low today, we seem to be paralysed by the mere...

-First Post Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in his address to the Annual Convention of Information Commissioners, in early October had  warned against the use of the Right to Information Act — one of the most popular people-oriented steps that the UPA has taken so far — to ridicule public officials and infringe on people’s privacy. The PM’s statement which expressed concern over frivolous and vexatious RTI applications, infringement of personal privacy and...