-The Hindu Study recommends that the scheme should move beyond benefits for women alone to change household behaviour NEW DELHI: The hidden truth of the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojna (PMUY), being touted in the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) election campaigning as one of the big successes of the incumbent government, is that most rural households with LPG (liquiefied petroleum gas) connections still use chulhas with firewood or dung cakes, to the detriment...

-The Hindu Business Line Kochi (Kerala): The two-day conference on ‘Models for Agricultural Development: Experiences of Farmer Producer Companies’, has called for sustained efforts to strengthen, streamline, support and coordinate Farmer Producer Organisations. The conference, jointly organised by the Department of Agricultural Economics, Kerala Agriculture University and Indian Society of Agricultural Economics (ISAE), mooted a national level consortium to help the FPCs realise their goals and lead the efforts to enhance farmers’...

-Frontline.in Interview with Aruna Roy. ARUNA ROY is a well-known social and political activist. A former Indian Administrative Service officer, she resigned from the IAS in 1975 and has since worked with the most oppressed in society. Aruna Roy’s observation on government service is indicative of her future concerns: “Everyone calls it an elite service; I always felt the discourse should be a bit better than what it was. I was shocked...

-Scroll.in The former Planning Commission member explains why the country needs to tread carefully on this idea. On January 1, when Indian news agency ANI asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi about the government’s plans to reduce agrarian distress, he said loan waivers do not work as a very small segment of farmers take loans from banks. “A majority of them take loans from money lenders,” said Modi. “When governments make such announcements,...

-Livemint.com This Uttar Pradesh village offers a microcosm of the broader change in Indian villages since independence Palanpur is a relatively unknown small village in Moradabad district of Uttar Pradesh. However, it has a special place in Development Economics because of a research project that has stretched over seven decades. Economists have conducted seven detailed surveys of Palanpur since the 1950s, a rare longitudinal database that shows how the village has changed...