-The Economic Times Piyush Khanolkar, a 38-year-old farmer from the Marathwada district of Maharashtra, has just sold off 10 gm of gold which he had accrued over a period of last five years to a local jeweller. With good rains not in sight yet, he has been forced to sell off the gold to create a corpus to meet his family needs in the coming months if there is a crop failure. Prabhu...

-The Hindu A definite acknowledgement of the potential of Aadhar for public service delivery, and especially for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA) by Bharat Bhatti, Jean Drèze, and Reetika Khera in their article “Experiments with Aadhaar” (editorial page, The Hindu, June 27, 2012), is a small step for Aadhaar, but a giant leap for the authors! Process re-engineering in government is never easy, there is enormous resistance both...

-PTI Rajkot: The consumption of bottled water in India has shown a jump of 21 per cent in last fiscal but still India is far behind as compared to global average, according to a research recently conducted by leading marketing firm IKON.  The per capita consumption of bottled water in India was at 16.20 litres during 2010-11 and jumped by almost 21 percent to 19.60 litres in 2011-12, IKON said in its...

The Bill to regulate medical education and govern human resource in health is a highly diluted version of the original draft. Distortions in the area of Human Resource for Health (HRH) are the root cause of many of the ills facing the health sector in India. Among them is the shortage of qualified medical professionals. The estimated density of 19 health workers (qualified and unqualified) per 10,000 population is nearly 25...

-The Telegraph Nearly three-fourths of India’s land area received poor rainfall during the first four weeks of the monsoon season, and an active monsoon phase is unlikely within the next week, weather scientists said today. The poor rainfall has stirred concern among agro-meteorology scientists, tasked with translating weather information into advisories for farmers throughout the year, as the period for paddy transplantation draws closer. “Rain during July is always crucial, but this year...