-Livemint.com Rural development secretary Amarjeet Sinha on how MGNREGS has evolved since 2006 to result in income, acreage, water tables, productivity and fodder availability Agrarian distress and rural distress are terms used interchangeably, but the rural economy today is very different from what it was many years ago, given the diversification of rural incomes and hence incorrect to think one means the other, says Amarjeet Sinha, secretary, ministry of rural development. In...

-ThePrint.in Study shows consumption of biofortified bajra also improves learning and mental abilities among school-going children. New Delhi: Biofortified pearl millet (bajra) can be a sustainable antidote for iron deficiency among adolescents in India and improve cognitive outcomes, a study published in the Journal of Nutrition claims. The study, conducted in Maharashtra among 140 economically-disadvantaged 12-16-year-olds, compared the effects of eating biofortified iron pearl millet to the conventional one. Their cognitive skills were...

-Livemint.com The job of policy strategists is always to identify the binding constraints to growth and then try to figure out which policies will help ease them Economists of a certain vintage will remember the old development models in which rapid Economic growth was held back by three key constraints. The first was the savings constraint. A poor country such as India could not save enough of its annual national income to sustain...

-Economic and Political Weekly Denial of social security facilities is to blame in cases of alleged starvation deaths. The distressing news of three young girls dying of starvation in the heart of New Delhi last week raises a number of questions; not only on the failure of the state to protect its citizens from hunger 70 years after independence but also on the development model that India seems to be following. Mansi,...

-TheWire.in Mexican economist David Barkin on India's neoliberal economics, growing inequalities, agrarian distress and more. David Barkin is Professor of Economics at the Metropolitan Autonomous University in Mexico City. He received his doctorate in economics from Yale University and was awarded the National Prize in Political Economics in 1979 for his analysis of inflation in Mexico. His research has focused on the development of an alternative to the capitalist economic model. In an...