-The Times of India To remove various disadvantages that women face in India, the Union government introduced Gender Responsive Budgeting (or Gender Budgeting) in 2005-06. It meant that high-flying promises on empowering women were to be backed by financial outlays and that a gender perspective was to imbue all policy making. It was always a tough call - from the home, to the workplace and generally in society women are treated like...

-The Times of India How much would it cost the central government to provide grain to the whole country at affordable prices? A calculation by the Delhi-based advocacy group Centre for Budget & Governance Accountability (CBGA) puts the figure at Rs 2,38,471 crore for one year. In the current financial year (2012-13), the Centre spent Rs 75,366 crore on the food subsidy, that is, about 0.74% of the gross domestic product....

-The Business Standard Varad Pande, officer on special duty, ministry of rural development, says the Aadhaar identification project aims to cover at least half of country’s population by next year. He talks about where it has reached, in an interview with Samie Modak & Abhineet Kumar. Edited excerpts: * What is the Aadhaar project’s status? The project started about two years earlier and now has a little more than 270 million enrolled, roughly...

-PTI The ongoing nursery admission process in the national capital would remain unaffected as the Delhi High Court today upheld the validity of two government notifications that gave powers to private unaided schools to formulate their own criteria. "We uphold the notifications," a bench comprising Chief Justice D Murugesan and Justice V K Jain said while disposing of a PILseeking quashing of the notifications issued by the Union Human Resources Development...

-The Hindu In carrying out Afzal Guru’s death sentence, the government deliberately ignored the view of the Supreme Court and courts across the world that hanging a person after holding him in custody for years is inhuman The execution of Afzal Guru on February 9, 2013 was an inhumane act by the Government of India. Afzal Guru was hanged seven years after the Supreme Court’s pronouncement of the death sentence on him...