-The Hindu Trust in official statistics is vital for democracy — the new policy must avoid centralisation David Spiegelhalter, president of Royal Statistical Society in the U.K., gave a most unusual presidential address in 2017. Instead of talking about esoteric statistical techniques, he talked about declining trust in numbers in a post-truth society bombarded by fake news and alternative facts. He recommended to the statistical community that the best way of inspiring...

-News18.com In an interview with News18’s Rupashree Nanda, Dreze, who was a member of Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council and an architect of the National Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), says that there have been no major initiatives in the social field in the last four years, with the partial exception of Swachh Bharat. Government data reveal that the Indian economy is growing at a robust rate but noted economist Jean Dreze believes...

-The Indian Express The crop in a well-marked plot of this field is, then, harvested, threshed, winnowed and weighed. If the produce contains moisture, it has to be dried first before weighing. Crop cutting experiments (CCE) have traditionally been conducted to obtain reliable average yield rates for estimation of agricultural production. These are mostly done by district/subdivision-level officials from the revenue, economics and statistics or agriculture departments of the concerned state governments....

-The Indian Express Raising agricultural exports requires the government to unburden policy of consumer bias. A balance should be struck between meeting the needs of food-insecure consumers and income-insecure farmers. The Agriculture Minister, Radha Mohan Singh, recently tweeted about the government’s resolve to increase the value of the country’s agricultural exports to $100 billion by 2022-23. The Dalwai Committee Report on doubling farmers’ incomes also talked of a similar target. It said,...

-The Indian Express More transparency is needed for Indian society to have an informed debate about rising inequality In a recent study titled ‘Indian income inequality dynamics (1922-2014): From British Raj to Billionaire Raj?’ published on WID.world, we presented new estimates of the distribution of national income in India, from 1922, when the income tax was introduced, up to 2014. In this study, we systematically combine the best available data at hand...