-The Hindu Business Line   The closure of three urea producing plants in south India has led to a sharp spike in imports and subsidies In April 2014, the UPA government in its last days, cut off the lifeline of three urea plants. It gave a final push to a ten-year-old trend of replacing domestic urea production with imports. The government-owned Madras Fertilisers, and the private sector units SPIC and MCF closed down...

Child sex ratio (CSR) in India has declined from 927 in 2001 to 918 in 2011 (girls per 1,000 boys), according to a new report entitled Missing Girls: Mapping the Adverse Child Sex Ratio in India (Census 2011). Of the total 640 districts in the country, 429 districts have experienced decline in CSR (see the link below).   Of these 429 districts, 26 districts exhibited drastic decline (of 50 points or more),...

-Livemint The development economist on the Modi government's initiatives and his stand on them, and MGNREGS The Narendra Modi-led government should consider replacing inefficient subsidies with a basic monthly income for all citizens, says Pranab Bardhan , emeritus professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley. Bardhan, who recently sparred with economists Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya in a debate over the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS),...

-PTI People killed in lightening incidents may now be compensated by the government if a recommendation of the Union Home Ministry to this effect is accepted. As India accounts for an average 400 deaths due to lightening every year, the Ministry has moved a proposal to the 14th Finance Commission, suggesting inclusion of lightning in the list of notified disasters eligible for assistance from national and state disaster relief funds. At present,...

-The Indian Express Lima: The climate talks at Lima were on the brink of collapse on Saturday after two attempts to push through watered-down proposals were rejected by developing countries, forcing the head of negotiations to summon the delegates for an extra day of work. The two-week-long negotiations were supposed to have ended on Friday evening with a decision on the kind of climate actions that countries could take in order to...