-The Hindu While liberalisation's backers are not squeamish in admitting that democracy is an impediment to the free market economic model, farmers who are dispossessed of land argue that they are undercompensated and that the profit of private companies is not a public purpose Since it was passed by Parliament in September 2013, the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act (LARR) has been criticised from...

-Economic and Political Weekly   A "high-level" committee makes half-baked recommendations which will rollback the PDS. A ccording to media reports, former Union Minister for Food Shanta Kumar recently disowned the National Food Security Act (NFSA) on behalf of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). He explained, without blinking, that the BJP had just pretended to support the Act when it was being discussed in Parliament, for fear of the possible electoral consequences of...

-The Hindu Occupational and geographic mobility across the region are bridging income and consumption-related disparities, says the World Bank report, ‘Addressing Inequality in South Asia'. The findings accordingly underscore the role of urbanisation and private sector participation as being critical to mitigating socio-economic disadvantages. Inequality should be understood in terms of monetary and non-monetary dimensions of well-being, contends the report. The share of the poorest 40 per cent of households...

-Newsclick.in By 2016 the richest 1% of the world's population will own more than 50% of the world's Wealth, says Oxfam's recent report on global Wealth inequality. Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of Oxfam International, said: "Do we really want to live in a world where the one percent own more than the rest of us combined? Clearly, the scale of global inequality is quite simply staggering and the gap between the richest...

-The Hindu Although urban Indians are slowly showing more openness in their attitudes towards women's attire, this is not the case when it comes to the issue of son preference As one of the world's most socially heterogeneous societies, building solidarity across social groups has been a singular challenge in India. Social bias in India is pervasive across a range of key cleavages - whether caste or class, region or religion. In this...