-The Hindu   The educational and economic development of Dalits is seen by the backward castes as a challenge to the social order, as recent incidents in Tamil Nadu show On the evening of November 7, 2012, a crowd numbering over 1000 people burst into three Dalit settlements in Dharmapuri, north-western Tamil Nadu, and laid them waste. Over a period of several hours, they looted, smashed and burned. Trees had been felled on...

-Economic and Political Weekly The Saradha group's collapse has possibly bankrupted lakhs of small investors robbing them of their life svaings, and has rendered thousands of its agents jobless. The scam highlights the failure of the government and its regulatory agencies to reign in the mushrooming chit fund companies in West Bengal. It also brings under the scanner the Trinamool Congress' proximity with the tainted group. In the wake of the...

-The Economic Times For many, it is a sense of deja vu. Fifteen years ago, the government and India's financial regulators came under fire after hundreds of crores were cleaned up by a few individuals and entities from gullible investors, who were promised fabulous returns from plantation schemes. In the uproar that followed, the government and the regulators sought to palm off the responsibility of regulation of such schemes on each...

-The Business Standard Overall GDP growth, farm growth has more impact on increasing real farm wages than MGNREGS Even as the United Progressive Alliance government is touting the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) as its biggest step for the uplift of the rural poor, a discussion paper floated by the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) suggests compared to this scheme, growth in overall gross domestic product, agriculture...

-Live Mint The experience of Kerala and Tripura shows how panchayati raj can help in the empowerment of women Chulubari (Tripura)/Kanjikuzhy (Kerala): Her relatives warned Hena Das, a resident of Chulubari in Tripura, against taking up political office because it wasn't "meant for women". Das disregarded the warnings. Two years on, she has no regrets. She also has no male colleagues; her fellow representatives on the board of an 12-member panchayat are all...