-TheWire.in With the 2019 elections around the corner, political parties should step up to the plate and display their commitment to children’s nutrition. This week, the prime minister made headlines by serving midday meals supplied by Akshaya Patra at a school in Uttar Pradesh’s Vrindavan. While he engaged in banter with the children about being late, one of the students wittily interjected that she didn’t mind as she had already eaten at home. While...
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No shortcuts to income guarantee -Harsh Mander
-The Indian Express Rahul Gandhi’s proposed scheme will do more harm than good if it comes at the cost of existing subsidies for the poor. Congress president Rahul Gandhi signaled the earnestness of his party’s resolve to end poverty and hunger by announcing an untried policy instrument — a Minimum Income Guarantee for the poor. “Millions of our brothers and sisters” could not be allowed to “suffer the scourge of poverty”...
More »The employment test -Pulapre Balakrishnan
-The Hindu The labour force may have actually shrunk while the Modi government has been in office Attuned as we have become to political grandstanding on the purpose of democracy, we may not have imagined that something so prosaic as statistics can alter our perception of how it is actually working for us. The emergence over the past few months of data on employment, speaking precisely the lack of it, cannot but...
More »PM Fasal Bima Yojana is suffering from low coverage since the last 2 years
The budgetary allocation for Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) as a proportion of total budgetary expenditure has been reduced marginally during the Interim Budget 2019-20. It may have happened because the coverage of gross cropped area under the scheme could not keep pace with the target that was set during the last two years. The Status of Implementation of Budget Announcements 2017-18, which was presented during the Union Budget 2018-19,...
More »Farm subsidy to loan waivers: A race to compensate farmers for their losses -Ashok Gulati
-Financial Express With elections approaching, every party is swearing by farmers and trying to woo them for their votes. The Modi government has already announced a package of Rs 75,000 crore for about 12.6 crore small and marginal farmers. While in absolute terms it looks sizeable, when it is divided by the number of farm families to be covered, it is miniscule—just `6,000 per family per year, which is about 6%...
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