-The Indian Express New Delhi: Vegetables are the noble folk of food world, loved equally by doctors and grandmothers. Vegetarians live off them and meat-eaters are told to live off them. But in Delhi, under every crunchy leaf of radish or the shiny brinjal hide dangerous amounts of pesticides that can slowly kill, shows a new study by JNU. Pritha Chatterjee and Aniruddha Ghosal report how growers, consumers and the authorities may...

-The Hindu The Prime Minister's call for making India a manufacturing hub and creating jobs should boost small and medium enterprises as well Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ‘Make in India' campaign is creating waves both in India and abroad. Given the government's intention to boost domestic manufacturing and create new jobs, its proposal to introduce a new policy for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) deserves a closer look. While Mr. Modi's...

-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...

-The Hindu   Instead of reinventing or restructuring the Planning Commission, we need to replace it with a think tank that supports high-quality independent research The Planning Commission is neither a constitutional nor a statutory body, but over the years it has acquired tremendous power of distant planning which is unsuitable to a country as diverse and complex as India. Let us neither reinvent nor restructure such a body. Let us, instead, make...

-The Economic Times None of the standard explanations quite explain the rise in food prices India has seen: pronounced since 2006 and alarming after 2010. Drought and poor rains? The country has seen good aggregate rainfall in most of those years. Spike in global prices? Those were high in 2007-08, not now. Fragmented value chains that allow middlemen to grab large margins? The value chain has always been fragmented. Growth has slowed...