-Hindustan Times The 15th Finance Commission (FC) has to submit its report in October 2019, which will be another important event in the evolution of India’s fiscal federalism framework. The tenure of the Narendra Modi government has seen important changes in India’s fiscal federalism set-up such as the abolition of the Planning Commission (PC) and the roll-out of the Goods and Services Tax (GST). The 15th Finance Commission (FC) has to submit...

-Livemint.com National Democratic Alliance has revamped the long-running Indira Awaas Yojana housing scheme but India remains a long way from Housing for All The quality of housing is the most visible aspect of poverty. In India’s cities and villages, the poorest almost always live in makeshift or dilapidated homes, which can be bad for their health and hurt their productivity. Governments have long tried to address this through different housing policies, the...

-NetworkIdeas.org The SDGs were obviously incredibly ambitious – far more so than the Millennium Development Goals that they succeeded – and so it was indeed a remarkable achievement that governments of almost all countries signed up to them. There were no less than 17 very significant and substantive goals, each containing multiple targets, and each target relying often on more than one indicator. And these goals and targets are not simply...

-VillageSquare.in The residents of Rampura, a small village in the buffer zone of the Panna Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh, have been asked to move. But, they say, with no allocation of alternative land, where will they go? “If they come to destroy our houses with elephants, we’ll throw all our belongings and our children into the pond, form a circle and ask them to shoot us, but we will not leave...

-The Hindu There is a compelling case for spending Rs. 3.6 lakh crore on the poor, but it must be done carefully The idea of a minimum income guarantee (MIG) has caught up with political parties. A MIG requires the government to pay the targeted set of citizens a fixed amount of money on a regular basis. With the promise of the Nyuntam Aay Yojana (NYAY) by the Congress party, it is...