-The Hindu Business Line Chennai: The Fourteenth Finance Commission has formulated its recommendations without any reference to the distinction between Plan and non-Plan outlays. This will facilitate greater attention to maintenance expenditure, and reduce incentives to boost capital works and show large-sized plans, said YV Reddy, Chairman of the Commission and former Governor of the RBI. Delivering the Raja J Chelliah Memorial Lecture at the Madras School of Economics on Monday, Reddy...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Maneka Gandhi has asked non-profit organisations to move beyond stereotypical skills like stitching and tailoring to "specific vocations" while applying for funds to train women and warned of a crackdown if the course didn't lead to employment. Sources in Maneka's women and child development ministry said the advisory, sent to all NGOs working with the department, had basically two objectives: weed out fraudulent applicants and impart skills with...

-The Hindu Business Line   Will the growth-versus-distribution debate finally be settled in favour of the former? There are few areas of settled concord in economic theory. That the dynamic of power is often determinant in the limited enclaves of consent has been evident in recent times in the growth-versus-distribution debate. Residual doubts about the tilt of current policy were laid to rest with the Economic Survey for 2014-15. In this assessment of the...

The India Country Report 2015 on Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) comes at a time when the Union Budget 2015-16 allegedly cut expenditure on several social sector schemes and programmes. This year's MDG country report says that India will fail to achieve two important targets pertaining to reducing hunger and maternal mortality by 2015, among others. Released by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI), the report says that India is...

-Business Standard Upward trend continues after base year revision, mainly because of high food prices India's Consumer Price Index (CPI) -based inflation rose to 5.37 per cent in February, from 5.19 per cent the previous month, mainly because of high food prices. After a revision in base year in December, from 2010 to 2012, this was a third straight month to see an upward trend in the rate of retail inflation. The rate...