-The Hindu Business Line Clientelism - tying benefits to political choices - cannot work because voting preferences cannot be ascertained. Do parties and their local agents link access to government services and benefits from government welfare schemes to how voters vote, or are expected to vote? This political strategy, which social scientists refer to as clientelism, depends on a massive investment in local leaders who collect information on voters' party preferences, vote choices...

-The Times of India VARANASI: In an extremely cold and shivering night, a man with torn clothes was eating something picked up from a dustbin at platform number 4 of Charbagh railway station of Lucknow. Some passenger may have thrown the leftover eatable. But, finding it insufficient to satiate his hunger the man started looking for some more stuff in other dustbins at the platform. When this correspondent tried to interact with...

-The Telegraph Bhubaneswar: The state government today reacted sharply to the Centre's decision to reject Vedanta's plan to mine bauxite from the Niyamgiri hills in Kalahandi district. Mining of bauxite in the Niyamgiri hills was to be carried out by the state-owned Odisha Mining Corporation (OMC) and Sterlite Industries Limited, a Vedanta group subsidiary. Steel and mines minister Rajanikant Singh said: "It is really unfortunate. The UPA government is not serious about the...

-The Times of India Silently, the warp and weft of Indian families is changing, perhaps forever. Women are getting married later, they are having babies later and the gap between successive children is getting larger. Put this together with the fact that the average number of children born to a woman continues to decline, and children survive more than in the past, and you can see that families are being much...

-The Times of India RAJKOT: Only one farmer committed suicide in Gujarat because of crop failure between 2003 and 2012! This is what the Gujarat government wants people to believe despite the furore over farmer suicides in the state. This came out in the form of a letter from Union agriculture ministry to RTI activist Bharatsinh Zala on the direction from the Prime Minister's Office (PMO). Zala had sought Prime Minister Manmohan...