-Livemint.com Increasing women’s ownership of land in rural areas can help cut poverty and boost agricultural output in a country like India where dependence on agriculture is high New Delhi: Increasing women’s ownership of land in rural areas can help cut poverty and boost agricultural output in a country like India where dependence on agriculture is high. Women constitute 30.3% of the total number of cultivators and 42.6% of the agricultural labourers...

-The Hindu We need to rethink social safety nets in India’s growing economy so that they can also focus on the accidents of life rather than solely on the accidents of birth. Sometimes the grand narratives of the Left and the Right do not seem to have any relationship with the lived experiences of ordinary Indians. For the past two decades, the Left has tried to expand social welfare programmes for the...

-The Hindu India's achievements in education were mixed, says the Congress MP. Chennai: The economic reforms that started in 1991 have helped cut poverty significantly even as inequality has widened appreciably, said Jairam Ramesh, Member of Parliament, and author of a book To the Brink and Back: India’s 1991 Story. “Poverty has declined significantly since 1991 while inequality has gone up during the same period. Inequality has become sharper; it has become worse....

-Hindustan Times New Delhi: Almost a quarter of India’s 370,000 beggars are Muslims, newly released data from the 2011 Census show, reinforcing that the community still lags behind on most counts despite the country’s rapid economic growth. Muslims, the largest minority who make up 14.2% of India’s 1.25-billion population, come out pretty much at the bottom of most socio-economic indices, even a decade after a high-level government probe into their historical disadvantages...

-The Indian Express The current bill does not take into account any of the criticism voiced against an earlier version, proposed under the UPA government in 2013; it continues to ignore the Forest Rights Act. A recent controversial bill that outlines a framework for the utilisation of compensatory afforestation funds is being strongly contested and challenged by civil society actors. It raises important questions that are fundamentally connected to forests: Whose...