-The Hindu Gondi is the lingua franca of the Maoist movement today, but All India Radio does not broadcast even a single new bulletin in the language. One winter morning, in Barwani district of Madhya Pradesh, I was watching a group of Adivasi kids peering into their mobile phones. The early morning sun was mellow, and they were so engrossed that they did not notice me drawing near. “We are doing Bultoo...

-Livemint.com The takeaway from World Bank’s World Development Report is that there is no short cut for developing countries if they want to reap digital dividends New Delhi: Every day, there are 4 billion searches made on Google. That number is also the count of people who do not have access to the internet, according to the World Development Report (WDR) 2016, released by the World Bank on Thursday. The report,...

Representatives of around 20 civil society organizations and NGOs met the Finance Minister Shri Arun Jaitley as part of pre-budget consultation on social sector on 12 January, 2016. Immediately after the pre-budget consultation, a press conference was held by some of these organizations to convey the media persons what demands/ suggestions were made.   Subrat Das, Executive Director of Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA, http://www.cbgaindia.org/) informed us that during...

-The Hindu Business Line Land should not be viewed as the only factor of productivity. And, managing food prices calls for better market intelligence The Centre’s emphasis on manufacturing, manifested in initiatives such as ‘Make in India’ and ‘Skill India’ have a downside: relative indifference to agriculture. Some of this is already visible in terms of rural distress and food price inflation. This can prove costly to the economy, reminiscent of the...

-Livemint.com The Met dept has decided to simply replace the word ‘drought’ to describe poor rainfall with ‘deficient year’ and ‘large deficient year’ New Delhi: There will be no more droughts in India. Since it can’t control the weather but can control language, the state forecaster India Meteorological Department (IMD) has decided to simply replace the word “drought” to describe poor rainfall with “deficient year” and “large deficient year”. What appears to be...