-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Ahead of state polls in five states, the Modi government has constituted a committee of senior officers drawn from intelligence agencies and state police to keep a close watch on the movement of essential commodities in the domestic and international markets. On Tuesday, Cabinet secretary P K Sinha took a review meeting on prices of such commodities and directed all these agencies to enforce stock limits...

Although there is sufficient data and evidence available in the public domain to argue whether there has been halving of poverty between 1990 and 2015, the same cannot be said with conviction about the halving of hunger—one of the targets set under the erstwhile Millennium Development Goals framework (replaced recently by SDGs). This is because the recently released data by the National Family Health Survey-4 (conducted in 2015-16) and the...

-Hindustan Times New Delhi: She greets you with a ‘Good morning’, then puts on her gloves, apron and a mask, and immediately gets down to mixing chemicals and cleansers in exact proportions. She is no paramedic. Meet the new-age Indian bai, who now accepts all sorts of assignments, right from cleaning and cooking to babysitting and eldercare, via an app on her smartphone. This professionalisation of your regular bai is a result of...

-The Hindu Business Line The scheme has made life easier for the people of this Andhra Pradesh village, one of the first in the state to have 100 per cent financial inclusion. But the local experience also throws up a few questions relevant nationally, reports Gunturi Naga Sridhar Fourty-year-old M Ravamma, from Polavaram, a village in the Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh, had a nightmarish experience two months ago. Her husband complained...

-The Hindu Jan Breman takes a long view of the changes he’s seen in India over half a century. Perhaps no other scholar in the social sciences has studied India’s poor and its informal economy as intensively as Jan Breman. The sheer temporal span of his research is mind-boggling. He began his study in south Gujarat 15 years after India’s Independence — in 1962. And he was in south Gujarat in...