-The Indian Express Around 100 KVKs are run by NGOs, including NGOs controlled by politicians. The Ministry of Agriculture has begun a review of the functioning of all 639 Krishi Vigyan Kendras (KVKs) in the country to detect - and put an end to - the "mismanagement of public money" by these institutions. At a meeting held over August 19-20 at the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) in Delhi, Minister of State...

-The Goan In the second decade of the 15th century, after the French ruler Charles VI was succeeded by his son bearing his name, a phrase was coined: "The king is dead, long live the king". The phrase literally meant that the transfer of sovereignty occurs simultaneously from the moment of death of an earlier monarch. Over the years, the phrase came to signify superficial change: the more things change,...

-The Hindustan Times The Independent Evaluation Office (IEO), which recommended the scrapping of its parent body, the Planning Commission, has found that its funding is being quietly choked. The IEO is an attached office of the Commission and receives money from it for conducting evaluation studies on different programmes of the government. On June 23, the IEO bit the hand that fed it: It made a report to the prime minister's office (PMO)...

-The Times of India Mitu Kumari, in charge of a government school in Patahin, a village on the outskirts of Muzaffarpur, Bihar, has a measured enthusiasm for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's announcement that toilets for girls will be built in schools that still don't have this basic facility. For her 146 students and three women teachers, absence of toilets is an intolerable problem. "I have written to everybody, from the village mukhia...

The Business Standard The Planning Commission has not been central to the policymaking process since the mid-1960s In his Independence Day speech, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the end of the Planning Commission. There will be few mourners at its funeral, mainly old war horses like me. So this is in the nature of an obituary for an institution in which I served for a decade and a half, and where I...