-The New Indian Express Something remarkable happened when the farmers came marching to Mumbai recently. Instead of greeting them with hostility, Mumbaikars welcomed them with affection, food and water. This change in attitude was triggered by the farmers’ extraordinary discipline and their efforts to ensure minimal disruption to the Mumbaikars’ routines. Even hard-boiled journalists acknowledged, for a brief moment, urbanites had realised  our farmers and adivasis were indeed facing difficult times. The...

-The Indian Express The NDA government’s approach towards MGNREGA — the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act — has differed from that of the previous UPA regime in one significant way: There is greater emphasis now in the building of “individual household” assets, as opposed to “community” assets, under the scheme that provides 100 days of guaranteed wage employment annually to every rural household whose adult members volunteer to do...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Amid growing public outrage over the Kathua and Unnao incidents, a collective of retired civil servants has written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi calling the current situation a “moment of existential crisis” in which the government’s response would determine whether the nation could “overcome the crisis of constitutional values, of governance and the ethical order”. In a strongly worded letter that sought to pin the blame...

-The Indian Express To deal with corruption, it is not enough to just get fiscal policies right. It is in our collective long-term interest to nurture individual values. I went to an optometrist last week, who gave me one of those cards to read where the font starts out large and then gets progressively small, to test your reading capacity. In this case what was interesting was the content of the card....

-Groundxero.in India’s forests are officially on sale. Forests, which are ecological and cultural constructs intrinsically linked with human communities that have been living in and using those for ages, have turned into mere repositories of ‘products’ such as timber and ‘ecosystem services’ that could be quantified, valued, priced and exchanged—or so the Draft National Forest Policy prepared by the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change(MoEF & CC) would have us...