-Livemint.com Aadhaar’s designers promised a robust privacy legislation, but the current government’s stance is that Indians have no fundamental right to privacy To govern India is to be constantly overwhelmed. So much needs to be done, and there’s so little to do it with. It’s hardly surprising that the Indian state is rarely ambitious. It seeks to manage, not to transform. One recent government initiative, less than a decade old, is by contrast...

-Caravan Magazine Arun Kumar is an eminent economist who has been studying the black economy in India for close to four decades. His 1999 book The Black Economy in India is among the foremost accounts of the black-money problem in the country. In Understanding the Black Economy and Black Money in India: An Enquiry into Causes, Consequences and Remedies, released in February 2017, Kumar discusses the misconceptions around black money, the...

-The Hindu The interaction between people and land is as old as human evolution. When early hunter-gatherers started to settle down in the Neolithic transition and practise agriculture, they began to change their relationship with land in a major way. Starting with the Holocene, approximately 11,500 years ago, many plants were domesticated for agriculture. These and the associated social and technological changes led to dense human settlements that then paved the...

-Bloomberg At the heart of the problem is the way informal businesses like the Varanasi weavers make payments. Varanasi: In Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s political base of Varanasi, Hinduism’s holiest city, weaver Zainul Abedin stares at the uneven mud floor of his home. Behind him, more than a dozen handlooms lie idle. Abedin is part of the collateral damage of Modi’s Nov. 8 decision to ban high-value currency notes, effectively cancelling...

-The Hindu Biodiversity integration into developmental plans is crucial for sustainable development In a ‘Mann Ki Baat’ broadcast recently, Prime Minister Narendra Modi made his environmental concerns clear when he asked people to use Ganesha and Durga idols made of clay instead of plaster of Paris. His appeal is bound to stimulate our environmental consciousness and encourage the preservation of precious natural resources. We need to build on this appeal and follow...