-The Indian Express On agriculture, three years into the Modi government, while many steps have been taken to realise promises made in 2014, others have fallen by the wayside With the Modi government completing three years in office, it is time to assess its performance in various sectors. We focus here on agriculture. Without robust growth in agriculture, “sabka saath, sabka vikas” will remain an empty slogan. There are two ways to evaluate...

-Frontline Low prices following a bumper crop and the State government’s inability to procure much of the yield leave tur farmers in Maharashtra in a quandary. DROUGHT or abundance, farmers seem to be perpetually doomed in Maharashtra. The most recent crisis unfolding in the agrarian segment is the crashing prices of pulses, particularly tur dal, and the inability of the State government to procure the entire crop. Adding to the problem...

-The Times of India MUMBAI: For the middle class, an immediate impact of GST would be the higher premium outgo due to the increase in rate of tax on insurance following implementation of the Goods and Services Tax. For families that own a car and pay for health and term insurance the increase in annual outgo would be close to Rs 1,000. "The immediate impact will be an increase in the tax...

-The Hindu Ties up with IIT-Kharagpur to gauge happiness levels Happiness, its pursuit and examining its essential nature have been considered the domain of philosophy, an ephemeral rather than tangible value. The Madhya Pradesh government, however, has tasked the Indian Institute of Technology-Kharagpur with finding a quantifiable answer to that eternal question — what constitutes happiness and how happy are people really. The State government had, in July last year, set up the...

-TheWire.in Conditionalities related to utilising health services do not make any sense in the absence of a service guarantee, and only serve to blame the victims and not the system for its failures. Nearly six months after the prime minister announced maternity benefits of Rs 6,000 to pregnant and lactating mothers, the cabinet yesterday approved the implementation of the maternity benefits programme (MBP) – a scheme that will likely exclude a large...