-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Noisy OB vans and an unending caravan of cars: on Friday afternoon, Kalkaji, a middle-class locality in south Delhi, was suddenly abuzz with activity and animation. It's barely an hour since the news flashed on TV screens. But everybody knows that L-6, a slim, unremarkable two-storey building, has become a very famous address. For word has gone around that it is the workstation of child...

-The Economic Times Dinkar Patil, a farmer from Buldhana district in Vidarbha, Maharashtra, normally cultivates cotton on his 13-acre farm land. This year, however, he has skipped the cotton crop and opted for soyabean and tur dal. "The rainfall started late. I did not cultivate cotton because of the delayed rains and the huge increase in cost of cultivation of the crop," said Patil. He is expecting a fall of about...

-DNA The Union government decision to decontrol prices of 108 drugs -- used to treat tuberculosis, AIDS, diabetes and heart ailments -- has jacked up their prices. In some cases, prices have seen an unbelievable rise. The price of Glivec, an anti-cancer tablet, for example, has risen from Rs 8,500 to Rs 1.08 lakh. Plavix, used to treat blood pressure and heart ailments, will cost Rs 1,615, against the earlier Rs 147. An...

-The Business Standard Make schemes mobile and portable, by focusing on people and not products India spends close to four per cent of its GDP on an alphabet soup of welfare schemes and subsidies - it has become a welfare state before becoming a developed state. Despite its significant costs, India's welfare system is neither comprehensive nor very effective - subject to huge leakages and corruption, and not well knit into...

-The Hindu Traditional hierarchies are too deeply entrenched to be reversed through one single measure; they need a concerted push, backed by strong will from different segments of society, including, but not confined to, politicians The rise of Other Backward Classes (OBC) and Dalit-Adivasi leaders in the political sphere is celebrated as India's "silent revolution." At the national level, this phenomenon has been especially marked since the early 1990s, leading to comments...