Newspaper Must Read Articles of The Day – 10 August 2015

Front Page/National

• Economy shifting gears, results of CII survey show: The survey respondents represented a wide range of sectors comprising small, medium and large enterprises and, in many cases, accounted for around 70 per cent of the total industry output in their respective sectors. Revival of stalled projects, de-bottlenecking of supply side linkages and the easing of interest rates should be undertaken to further bolster growth.

• India plans to barter surplus sugar for pulses from abroad: The Centre is planning to barter surplus sugar in the country for pulses that are being imported at high prices and the Ministries of External Affairs and Commerce and Industry are working together on the proposal. Some African countries, Myanmar etc are potential targets.

• The one-man army in schools: It is not possible to achieve dream targets like the “Make in India” without a strong public education system. But the sad reality is that over 98,000 schools in India function with only a single teacher.

• Environment Ministry pushes for contentious hydel projects: The Union Environment Ministry has set up a third committee to review some contentious hydroelectric power projects in Uttarakhand. Environmentalists are seeing this as an attempt to overwrite and compromise the findings of the previous two committees (the Ravi Chopra Committee and the Vinod Tare Committee), which had both warned against the hydel projects.

• Recognised colleges need not seek MCI nod to increase seats: Once a medical qualification granted by an institution has been recognised by the Union government, there is no need to seek fresh recognition from the Medical Council of India every time the admission capacity for the course is increased, the Supreme Court has held. This has settled a legal question worrying many institutions, who had to always approach the Govt even for raising capacity by one seat.

Opinion/Editorial

• Democracy’s essence: The national survey by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies shows that while most of the country unequivocally prefers democracy as the best form of government in all cases, there was a higher preference for authoritarianism among those with the highest media exposure, those who lived in metros, those who were rich and those who were college-educated. This is obviously because these groups have already reaped the benefits of democracy, and now do not want the poor to enjoy benefits of their labour (because all the tax they pay goes to poor peoples’ schemes).

• Vengeance in Bangladesh: A small article describing the contexts under which the recent killings of Bangladeshi writers has occurred.

• Privacy, a non-negotiable right: A criticism of the Attorney General’s contention that Indians do not have any inherent right of privacy under the Constitution.

• Carving a new revenue model: With the explosion of online journalism, traditional models of generating income (for print media) no longer work. major publications in India would need to find an answer to the revenue model question. How do they want to monetise their business, because in an increasingly digital future, they have to find newer ways to fund the journalism efforts.

• The dark side of pleasure: Porn is a fundamentally exploitative practice, that promotes violence and coercion against women. The aim of the govt in taking this step is not to intrude upon certain kinds of pleasures that are considered ‘bad’ by the society, but to teach the society to reject forms of pleasure that arise from the exploitation and degradation of a section.

• New financial commission, a faulty road map: Amid all the talk about a New Financial Code (NFC) and the hullabaloo about the government’s apparent attempt to curtail the powers of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), some deeper questions seem to have been missed: what is the exact aim of the proposed Indian Financial Code (IFC)? What is it trying to fix? Is a need for a fix at all? (The accompanying table sums up the points quite well).

International/World Affairs