-DNA Elections 2014 are around the corner. And when elections draw nearer, the Government suddenly wakes up and thinks of its duties towards the people. This year is no exception. Whether it is the one-rank-one-pension for the retired defence personnel or the legal monthly entitlement of 5kg of wheat/rice/millet for poor households under the national Food Security Act or the announcement of a 7th Pay Commission along with a DA instalment...

-The Hindustan Times As parties gear up for polls, India's two most talked about non-Congress ruled states - Gujarat and Bihar - have been rated as having lesser spending Inequality as compared to most other states of the country. A new government study ranks Gujarat as the state having least Inequality in urban areas except four north-eastern states of Manipur, Meghalaya, Nagaland and Mizoram. For rural areas, Bihar earns the top slot...

-The Telegraph Even as it is busy trying to resolve other people's conflicts in so many parts of the world, the United Nations has recently created a conflict of its own. It began innocuously enough. The organization has always tried to get consensus around matters on which it is often very difficult to arrive at such consensus. The usual strategy to achieve this is to sufficiently water down the language in its...

-The Guardian International Monetary Fund paper dismisses rightwing argument that redistributing incomes is self-defeating   The International Monetary Fund has backed economists who argue that Inequality is a drag on growth in a discussion paper that has also dismissed rightwing theories that efforts to redistribute incomes are self-defeating. The Washington-based organisation, which advises governments on sustainable growth, said countries with high levels of Inequality suffered lower growth than nations that distributed incomes more evenly. Backing...

-Down to Earth The country accounts for 29 per cent of the global deaths of newborns on their first day of birth In spite of reducing child mortality, deaths of infants in India on the first day of birth is still way too high and likely to hamper it from achieving the millennium development goal for curbing infant mortality rate (IMR) In 2012, as many as 1.013 million babies died on the...