-The Hindu The political scientist on the danger to India’s checks and balances, and the perils of the democratisation of mediocrity in universities Professor of political science and a holder of the Madan Lal Sobti Chair, Devesh Kapur has been director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary India at University of Pennsylvania since 2006. Mr. Kapur, who recently co-edited Public Institutions in India: Performance and Design, says our public universities...

A recent one-liner about the achievement of the present Central government goes like this: bovine has become ‘divine’ during the NDA’s rule. But why do such jokes originate? Media reports suggest that unprecedented aggression has taken place during the recent months in the name of the peaceful looking animal – cow. Mob lynching and killings by fringe groups have been reported from various parts of the country, especially targeting Muslims and...

-Outlook Banks are fleecing customers to shore up their profits and offset the dead weight of bad loans to corporates When the GST era dawned this month, online jokesters quipped that it was the most inscrutable thing ­after Duckworth Lewis. But paradoxically, it may have brought a disquieting clarity to another zone of universal experience. Amid the flurry of news reports detailing what would entail a higher tax of 18 per cent,...

-Hindustan Times The CSE report shows that insurance companies had only settled 32.45% of the claims made till April 2017. New Delhi: An independent evaluation of the Modi government’s much-touted crop insurance scheme has showed that insurers gained nearly Rs 10,000 crore in gross profit during the last kharif season, from June to November 2016. However, it settled less than a third of the crop-loss claims filed till early this year. The report released...

-The Hindu Business Line New Delhi: India’s flagship national agricultural insurance programme — Pradhan Mantri Fazal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) — is found seriously wanting in its implementation at ground level, New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) said on Friday. “PMFBY is a classic case of poor implementation of a good scheme,” said Chandra Bhushan, CSE deputy director, at a meeting here. This is because at the State level, PMFBY vision...