-The Indian Express Agriculture’s contribution to poverty reduction is five times more than that of metropolitan centres Speaking at the third BRICS Urbanisation Forum in Visakhapatnam on September 14, Deputy Chairman of the Niti Ayog, Arvind Panagariya, announced that “Without cities we can’t grow rapidly”. He added, “urbanisation plays an important role in poverty alleviation”. Both claims are exaggerated and somewhat misleading. A recent report prepared for the UN points out that, over...

-FirstPost.com The issue of triple talaq has once again ignited the age-old debate on the desirability of the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) in India. The Law Commission of India sought the views of people on the implementation of UCC. It put out a questionnaire on 7 October, which faced stiff opposition from the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) and some legal experts as it was alleged that it focuses...

-The Hindu A more progressive Central law on land acquisition is now in place, but several States have already either amended the new law or enacted legislation of their own. On August 31, the Supreme Court in Kedar Nath Yadav v. State of West Bengal delivered one of the most momentous decisions of the year. It invalidated the expropriation of land in Singur by the erstwhile Left Front government in Bengal, and...

-The Indian Express “Due to the large-scale deforestation, there has been a significant drop in the amount of rainfall received,” said Subimal Ghosh, a faculty member associated with the study. Mumbai: DEFORESTATION AND conversion of forest land to crop land has weakened the monsoon in India, a study by a team from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Bombay has found. The team from the Interdisciplinary Program in Climate Studies of IIT-B studied...

Rising prices of dal: How to deal with it? The 68th session of the United Nations General Assembly declared 2016 as the International Year of Pulses. In India, however, ordinary citizens are under enormous duress due to the skyrocketing prices of dal/ lentils since the last one year. The website of Price Monitoring Cell of the Department of Consumer Affairs shows that dal prices varied across places. For example, the...