Eurozone rates to stay at record low; India's plan for cheap food; How Twitter has changed India

1 Eurozone rates to stay at record low (BBC) The European Central Bank (ECB) president, Mario Draghi, has said that rates will remain at current or lower levels for an "extended period". This represents the first time that the ECB has given an indication of its future guidance on the rate of interest in the eurozone. The ECB left interest rates at the historic low level of 0.5% on Thursday.

The decision not to cut rates further comes amidst a backdrop of political crisis in Portugal after two key ministers resigned. Speaking at a news conference following the ECB's interest rate announcement, Mr Draghi would not be drawn on how long he expected rates to remain low, only that the decision was "unanimous". "It's not six months, it's not 12 months - it's an extended period of time," he said.

On his reasons for revealing the ECB's plan to keep rates low, Mr Draghi said: "We have an outlook of inflation in the medium term, such that it would justify this new way of communication our forward guidance - a downward bias in interest rates."

2 India’s plan for cheap food (Soutik Biswas on BBC) The Indian government has launched a giant programme to provide subsidised food to two-thirds of the population. The food security ordinance will provide 5kg of cheap grain every month to nearly 800 million poor people. Ministers were criticised for passing the measure as an ordinance, after failing to win parliamentary support. Critics say the plan is a political move to win votes and will drain India's finances. Supporters say it will help reduce poverty.

The ambitious National Food Security Bill is being called one of the world's largest welfare schemes. The scheme is intended to combat hunger - despite impressive economic growth in recent years, India still struggles to feed its population. It has more malnourished children than any other country in the world. 

The bill proposes to provide a kilo of rice at three rupees (six cents; four pence), wheat at two rupees and millet at one rupee. The measure will apply to 75% of Indians living in rural areas and 50% of the urban population. Supporters say it will go a long way in reducing poverty, especially in parts of the country which are worse off than sub-Saharan Africa, our correspondent reports. But there are many economists who question how India can fund the expensive scheme, which will see the country's annual food subsidy bill double to more than 1.3 trillion rupees ($23.9bn). The government insists money will not be a problem.

Opponents of the scheme also criticise the method of delivering the food - via India's notoriously corrupt and inefficient state-owned cheap food ration shops. Many politicians criticised the move to push through the bill as an ordinance rather than putting it to a vote by MPs. 

3 How Twitter has changed India (Sadanand Dhume in The Wall Street Journal) As digital milestones go, it’s easy to freight this one with exaggerated significance. On Wednesday, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi ended Union Minister Shashi Tharoor’s long reign as India’s most popular politician on Twitter. As of Thursday night, Mr. Modi had about 1.8 million followers, a figure for the most part exceeded only by those at the pinnacle of cricket or Bollywood.

Social media boosters exaggerate the role Facebook and Twitter can play in a country where only an eighth of the population has access to the Internet. Indeed, the real significance of technology lies elsewhere. By breaking the left-leaning intelligentsia’s monopoly on ideas, Twitter and Facebook have the potential to offer an alternative to the reductive identity politics and populist economics that hobble India. Ultimately, it’s only by winning the war of ideas that reformers can hope to permanently transform the country’s political landscape.

But first, the case for social media’s new salience in electoral politics. Earlier this summer, a widely cited report by Mumbai’s Iris Knowledge Foundation and the Internet and Mobile Association of India claimed that 78 million Facebook users will “wield a tremendous influence” over 160 of India’s 543 directly-elected parliamentary seats. In these so-called “high impact” constituencies, Facebook users constitute either 10% of the total vote, or command greater numbers than the margin of victory in the 2009 election.

For perspective, Barack Obama alone has nearly 1.5 times as many followers (about 33 million) as the entire Indian Twitterverse. And though the consulting firm McKinsey expects the number of Internet users in India to more than double to 330 million by 2015, much of this expansion will likely happen too late to substantively affect an election barely 10 months away.

Effectively, Twitter and Facebook have accelerated India's process of rejoining the world from which it had divorced itself for four decades by pursuing economic autarky. Regardless of whether it is the best way to deal with corruption, the threat of radical Islam or the folly of reckless populism, the time where a handful of elites can effectively control the "commanding heights" of the debate is ending.