-TheWire.in Unless consumer preferences shift to climate resistant crops, goals associated with the policy won’t materialize. On March 14, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) uploaded a draft of the National Forest Policy 2018, three decades years after the last such policy. The draft appears to be an attempt to shift the approach towards forestry in India – specifically, from a local community- and ecology-centric approach emphasised in the...

-The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy Menstrual hygiene, an essential building block of a woman’s health, suffers wanton neglect in India’s public discourse. Though public policies are in place, the progress made by India’s government, private, and civil society sectors is not in sync with the nation’s aspiration to be a global economic superpower. R. Sujatha, consultant on gender issues, and R. Gopinath, development economist, critique the steps taken,...

-Livemint.com Farmers continue to be vulnerable to frequent episodes of losses that neither the state nor the markets have been able to mitigate The dramatic long march to Mumbai involving thousands of distressed farmers on 12 March is a remarkable feat of peaceful protest against the state, given its apathy towards farmers’ distress as well as its failures in safeguarding tribal land rights. However, what is surprisingly missing in this poignant narrative...

-Livemint.com The only way to solve the farmers’ problem is to make entry to other sectors attractive by creating employment opportunities, and to make it easy to exit farming Farmers have a bad romance with the Indian polity. On the one hand, India loves, even worships, these farmers. On the other, Indian policymakers create the most impossible regulatory environment for the agricultural sector, trapping farmers in a low-income, low-productivity occupation. The latest...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Labour minister Santosh Kumar Gangwar told the Lok Sabha on Monday that the government had not set a target for job creation.   In a written response to INLD MP Dushyant Chautala’s question on employment over the past three years, Gangwar said, “No target has been set by the government. However, the employment generation ... is the priority concern of the Government (sic).” The minister said the government...