-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Supreme Court today asked the Centre to explain its failure to implement the previous government's flagship food security programme, aimed at providing cheap grains to two-thirds of the population with a special focus on children and pregnant and lactating women. The scheme, estimated to cost Rs 1.25 lakh crore a year, was launched in 2013 and was to come into force from July last year. But the...

-The Indian Express As many parts of the country reel under a back-to-back drought, Kavitha Iyer reports from the region that’s at the centre of the crisis. Weeks before hanging himself from a tree on his farm on June 1 this year, Kalyan Khomne, 55, read out a newspaper report to his son Shahdev. “It was about a farmer’s suicide in our taluka,” says 26-year-old Shahdev. His village, Nandurghat, and the nearby...

-The Indian Express Once again, the debate on census population Data on religion misses the point. With the release of the Census 2011 Data on religion and misleading reports in the media, the growth of the Muslim population has become the focus of the debate once again. Almost 10 years ago, in 2004, a similar but sharper controversy had erupted when the government released the Census 2001 Data on religion. There...

-The Indian Express On census, Christians and conversions, Surjit Bhalla has tortured his Data to make it say what he wants to hear. Last week, Surjit S. Bhalla wrote a piece in The Indian Express titled ‘Census, Christians, Conversions’. After going over well-trodden ground on what the recently released Census 2011 figures meant, he came to the crux of the matter as he saw it: Why hasn’t the Christian population fallen...

-Business Standard Govt concludes it has no mapped information on perennial rivers, dams & irrigation projects which would be impacted by coal mining To be finalised soon by the government, the number of inviolate coal blocks where mining will be banned is likely to be reduced from the originally identified 206 to less than 35. The environment ministry has decided to again dilute the parameters for identifying which of India's 793 blocks...