-The Economic Times Just after Prime Minister Narendra Modi showcased a democratic and developing India to the global leaders at the annual meet of World Economic Forum at Davos in Switzerland, India's forMer RBI governor Raghuram Rajan punctured Modi's India pitch. Modi said,"In India, 'Democracy, Demography and Dynamism' together are shaping the country's destiny and leading it towards the path of Devepolment." He also said, "Our Mantra is 'Reform, Perform And Transform." However,...

  Budgetary allocation to a particular sector indicates how much priority the government assigns to that sector as compared to the rest. A preliminary analysis by the Inclusive Media for Change team indicates that the actual expenditure (net of receipts and recoveries) by two of the country’s most important ministries, namely the Ministry of Agriculture & FarMers Welfare (MoAFW) and the Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD) was less than 1 percent...

-The Financial Express Over 14 crore households who cultivate on land owned by others under a formal lease agreement or even under a temporary arrangement overseen by the gram panchayats or other official functionaries may soon start getting assorted sops doled out to “farMers” by the government just as their land-owing counterparts do. According to official sources, the definition of farMer will be changed via a gazzette notification to include cultivators...

-The Economic Times The art of good governance is through trial and error, figuring out what works where and how, and scaling up from below. Only then can one have a solid foundation. Aadhaar literally means something that holds (dhaaran: to hold). The word is interpreted either as a foundation or base (such as, to a building), or a container (such as, of water), even though given that it is an identity-verifying...

-The Indian Express The crisis in the crop’s prices in two of the four years of the Modi government illustrate that farMers no longer matter to it. FarMers are habitually great raconteurs. My grandfather would often narrate an episode, when he encountered a farMer sitting by a heap of potatoes in the middle of the night. On investigating what compelled the farMer to guard potatoes when there were no buyers, he was...