-The Hindu A recent study by researchers at the University of Michigan, published in the Economic and Political Weekly, provides insights into how Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s online image was constructed and evolved over time. By analysing data from @narendramodi Twitter handle — official account of Mr. Modi — researchers found that a combination of carefully crafted tweets and strategic follow-backs to other Twitter accounts helped Modi build a powerful online...
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Getting our goats -Bibek Debroy
-The Indian Express We need to make goat farming organised, tie it to agriculture and animal husbandry. This is an apocryphal story, but it is bizarre enough to be true. Once every four or five years, we have a livestock census. The latest one is the 19th, for 2012. This anecdote is about the 2007 version. In a village in West Bengal, there were 31 geese — 17 male, 14 female. An...
More »Neglecting Health Expenditure in Favour of the Chimera of Insurance -Dipa Sinha
-TheWire.in When the data tells us insurance-based health schemes have not reduced out-of-pocket expenditure for the poor, Jaitley’s budgetary focus should have been on boosting public provision of health care. Despite sustained economic growth for over two decades, improvements in health indicators in India have not kept pace. By 2015, India was able to meet only four out of the ten health targets set under the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for that...
More »The near death, and revival, of MGNREGS -Sanjeeb Mukherjee
-Business Standard Back-to-back droughts and record-low farm commodity prices have forced the NDA government to look at MGNREGS in a new light.Things have started to look up for the scheme About a year back, Raqibul Hussain, Assam's rural development minister, was unhappy because he could not stop the Central government from lowering the state's annual entitlement under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme for 2014-15. This, he said in a day-long...
More »Reality of US Farm Subsidies: An Analysis of Agricultural Act of 2014 -Biswajit Dhar & Roshan Kishore
-Economic and Political Weekly Biswajit Dhar (bisjit@gmail.com) teaches at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Roshan Kishore (roshan.jnu@gmail.com) is currently a data journalist with Mint. With the formation of the World Trade Organization in 1995, the United States farm subsidies had moved towards income support, reducing spending on price support measures. The explicit reason was that the WTO had held that the latter forms were more...
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