-Down to Earth Jean Dreze argues that we should not leave the making of an equitable society to experts alone What does one make of the shameful statistic that over 200 million Indians still subsist below the poverty line? How does one square it with the equally obscene distinction that we have the world’s fourth largest number of billionaires, thus making India the second most unequal nation after Russia? Indeed, how...

-PTI The economist said Gujarat almost always comes around the middle when it comes to any ranking of development indicators, whether it is social indicators, human development index, child development index or multi-dimensional poverty index. New Delhi: Development economist and activist Jean Dreze on Sunday said there was "no evidence" that the so-called "Gujarat Model" was a model in any sense, pointing out to the state's backwardness in social indicators. "If you look...

-The Times of India NAGPUR: Multiple cropping (growing many crops simultaneously), and intercropping (growing different crops between rows of a single crop) can completely do away with the problem of pest attacks, and help minimize or eliminate use of pesticides. Ignoring this well known fact, agriculture department as well as farmers have resorted to extreme and unscientific use of pesticides, raising costs for farmers, and even leading to farm labour deaths...

-Hindustan Times The design of large injections of public funds for India’s agriculture economy needs to be informed with rigorous evaluations on what is effective for higher farm productivity. A wage subsidy for farm-labour is one modification that needs an evaluation, to generate evidence to inform how the MGNREGA policy generates employment when there is need, but without stress to farm production Indian agriculture is witnessing a period of complex socio-economic distress,...

-TheWire.in Based on a militarised notion of ‘targeting’, such welfare policies deny citizens the right to basic services. In an incisive analysis on anti-poverty and other social security programmes, Professor Amartya Sen astutely asks why the notion of targeting, which is essentially a military concept, is so routinely invoked in analytical discourses on basic welfare rights for the people as well as in policy framing in this respect. Indeed, why would an...