-The Times of India NEW DELHI: In an indicator of the state of school infrastructure in the country, Centre told the Rajya Sabha on Thursday that over 37% of schools did not have electricity connections till March 2017. While only 62.81% schools in the country have electricity connections, Jharkhand is at the bottom of the list with just 19% schools in the state having access to electricity. The national capital along...

-Business Standard/ India Spend 52% of India's agricultural households are indebted; with an average outstanding loan of Rs 47,000 India’s foodgrain production rose five times over six decades, according to 2016 government data, the latest available. But with the average Indian farm half as large as it used to be 50 years ago and yields among the lowest in developing economies, both the agriculture sector and farmers have been driven to the...

-Livemint.com Unlike the dhoti-clad, topi-wearing quintessential ‘kisan’, the new Indian farmer is vocal and tech-savvy New Delhi: In the winter of 1988 when the feisty farmer leader from Uttar Pradesh, Mahendra Singh Tikait, laid siege to Delhi with thousands of cultivators and their cattle literally creating a mess of the boat club lawns, agriculture’s share in India’s gross domestic product (GDP) was about 30%. About three decades later, the farm sector’s share in...

-Livemint.com The Aadhaar project is a textbook example of how not to design and execute a public policy initiative in India When it was first launched in 2009, Aadhaar signalled a promise to repair the corroded plumbing of India’s leaky public delivery systems. The unique biometric identity would help reduce duplicate and ghost entries in the list of beneficiaries of government schemes, and pave the way for direct benefit transfers to them...

-The Hindu BJP lists ‘pro-farmer’ steps; govt. blind to problems: Digvijaya Opposition members in the Rajya Sabha sought to corner the Centre on the issue of agrarian crisis on Tuesday, accusing it of floating policies that were detrimental to farmers’ interests. However, defending the Narendra Modi government, members from the BJP and its allies hailed the “pro-farmer” initiatives taken under his leadership. Prabhat Jha, Parshottam Rupala, Ram Narain Dudi, Sanjay Raut and La....