-The Business Standard   A seven-point agenda to fix India's public services, and overcome poorly designed systems India's Achilles Heel remains its inability to deliver public services. India's aspiration to be a global economic power will be unrealised if this remains unsolved. Why is this problem so particularly acute? Is it political interference and corruption, poorly designed programmes and weak administration? Or a much deeper cultural problem of aversion to collective action, often...

-Down to Earth   Faulty implementation of FRA said to be a reason for party winning just three of the 41 tribal seats in the country However, most of the tribal seats this time have been won by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and regional parties such as the Biju Janata Dal (BJD), YSR Congress, Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) and Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) (see list of seats below). It is strange that the...

-The Times of India   NEW DELHI: The 2G scam-tainted A Raja, DMK candidate from Nilgiris constituency in Tamil Nadu, had to taste humiliation not only at the hands of his AIADMK rival C Gopalakrishnan but also had to put up with a spoiler called NOTA. NOTA, short for none-of-the-above option introduced for the first time in this Lok Sabha election, polled the highest votes in Nilgiris, 46,559 to be precise, beating...

-The Hindu   Horticulture Department is doing a survey on the crop in the State Karnataka: The Horticulture Department has begun a comprehensive survey of the jackfruit crop to set the stage to promote its cultivation in a big way in the State. Jackfruit cultivation is suitable for Karnataka because of the presence of large tracts of drought-prone land. Horticulture Director D.L. Maheshwar disclosed this at the inaugural session of a two-day international symposium...

-The Business Standard   Or, why our subsidy and tax policies have been almost exactly wrong Thomas Piketty's seminal book on inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, comes at a fortuitous time. Although inequality has been a well-discussed issue in India for some time now, the success of the book contributes by sharpening the debate. It complements the McKinsey Global Institute's (MGI) report titled "From poverty to empowerment: India's imperative for jobs, growth,...