-Livemint.com Gujarat has high per capita income and an enviable industrial sector. But it has a lot of progress to make on health and other social parameters  Earlier this week, the Gujarat government renamed the dragon fruit as Kamalam, its explanation being that its outer shape resembles that of a lotus. This symbolic act has drawn criticism for the state’s priorities, especially during a global pandemic. Here are five areas of greater...

-Hindustan Times The concentration of political and economic power has made democratic contestation challenging. Citizens are finding other methods Fearing that India’s controversial proposed farm laws will disproportionately benefit a few corporate magnates, farmers have made Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance storefronts and Reliance Jio infrastructure the sites of major protest over the past few months. While Ambani has insisted that his company has no plans to enter corporate farming, his purported political networks...

A recent report by Christian Aid -- an international NGO based out of London -- says that the world was not just hit by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, it actually faced massive loss of lives and livelihoods owing to the intensification of the ongoing climate crisis. Climate-related disasters varied from fires in Australia and the United States, floods in China, India and Japan to storms in Europe and the...

-Hindustan Times Recent research at the London School of Economics examines a decade of high-quality farmer-buyer data from Kenya during a period when it introduced radical farm laws to encourage agri-businesses to determine impacts on small farmers In the debate on new farm laws, emotions are running high with concerns that small farmers are being pitted against large agri-businesses. The new laws contain mostly untried policies and it is difficult to gauge...

-The Indian Express The Union budget should focus on enhancing credit flows to the small and marginal farmers, increase investment in health and education. The first advance estimates of GDP for 2020-21 are much better than the earlier market consensus and shows the inherent strengths of the Indian economy. The economy is expected to contract by 7.7 per cent implying a COVID-19 induced loss of Rs 9.61 lakh crore in real terms...