-The Hindu Thanks to the caste system, India has always been an unequal society. What is even more worrying is that inequality appears to have deepened in the past two decades The Boston Consulting Group’s 15th annual report, “Winning the Growth Game: Global Wealth 2015”, has received extensive coverage in the Indian media. The report comes on top of the Global Wealth Databook 2014 from Credit Suisse, which provides a much more...

-The Times of India A staggering range of commonly used chemicals - from insecticides to plastic additives to some common medications - are likely to cause cancer even in very low amounts. This was the conclusion reached by a massive study involving 174 scientists from 28 countries -- including India -- who researched the chemical actions of these chemicals. The study says that it is possible the combined effect of many...

-DNA What is worse is that just the top 30 cases of default account for a Rs 1.21 lakh crore, which is almost 40% of the Non Performing Assets (NPAs) in banks. The upper middle class, who usually takes loans of over Rs 1 crore, accounts for 33% of the total NPAs.  It's not the poor farmers or the middle class who are defaulting on their loans. It's the country's super rich,...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Tweaks the home ministry has proposed to rules governing foreign funding for NGOs will leave these organisations at the mercy of the government's unilateral interpretations of what violates an undefined idea of "national interest", social activists have said. More than the suggested new rules themselves, put up on the ministry website for feedback yesterday, it's the mandatory declaration proposed for NGOs at the end that critics have termed...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The summer monsoon weakened across large swathes of India in the past century, scientists said today, linking the reductions in rainfall to hitherto-unobserved trends that they say portend a dangerous drying of the Indian subcontinent. Scientists at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, said they had identified a significant weakening trend in summer rainfall between 1901 and 1912 over central and northern India, the Ganga-Brahmaputra basins and...