-Down to Earth Prices of some vegetables plummeted by 60 per cent between July 2016 and April 2017, further aggravating agrarian crisis Three years after Narendra Modi-led NDA government came to power, India witnesses unprecedented level of low food inflation. States like Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh have been witnessing farmers’ unrest for quite some time now. Six farmers were killed in police firing in a protest rally held in Mandsaur district...

-Livemint.com Maharashtra farmers continue with their protests despite assurance from chief minister Devendra Fadnavis of a debt waiver by October New Delhi: The fifth day of the strike by protesting farmers in Maharashtra on Monday witnessed unprecedented visuals of milk tankers being ferried to state capital Mumbai under heavy police cover. Not long ago, before the monsoons arrived last year, rail wagons transporting water to severely drought-hit districts in the state were...

-Firstpost.com If one purely compare the January-March quarter GDP growth of fiscal year 2017 and fiscal year 2016, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s prediction that demonetisation will shave off 2 percentage points of India’s GDP has come true. In the January-March quarter of FY16, GDP grew by 9 percent, which has come down to 6.1 percent in the corresponding quarter this year— a near 3 percentage point difference. Even the full...

-Firstpost.com “What you think is very clear, is not very clear,” told union finance minister Arun Jaitley to a reporter at a Delhi presser on Thursday called to take stock of Modi government’s 3-year performance. The reporter was asking about the impact of demonetisation on the GDP citing the sharp decline (6.1 percent) in the Jan-Mar quarter. Jaitley played down the impact of demonetisation saying it wasn’t the primary reason for...

-The Indian Express Aadhaar doesn’t empower people, only the state Ironically, in the week that the UIDAI revealed its draconian face, serving a legal notice to those who exposed flaws in the Aadhaar eco-system, Ajay Pandey (CEO, UIDAI), wrote, “The critics tend to forget that Aadhaar empowers the people, not the state” (‘Criticisms Without Aadhaar’, IE, May 13). However, government data reveals that Pandey is wrong to believe that “Aadhaar empowers...