-Hindustan Times The government should pay 25% of wages of MGNREGA workers employed in individual farms and the poor should get an option to choose between money or subsidised food grains under the public distribution system (PDS). These are a few suggestions to be made by the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog in the occasional paper that will be discussed with the states for framing a national policy to eliminate...

Like 2015, this year too unseasonal rainfall and hailstorm have taken the farmers by surprise. Recent media reports suggest that extreme weather event has damaged rabi crops in a number of states from north India. The Weekly Weather Report prepared for the week spanning 10-16 March, 2016, which was issued by the India Meteorological Department (IMD), shows that excessive rainfall was observed in Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand,...

-Kafila.org The last few months have seen an unusual public engagement around questions of secularism, freedom of speech, sedition and the like, with furious debates everywhere from our campuses, streets and TV studios to the floor of Parliament. The budget session has been enlivened by scenes of high drama, with the leading lights of the Treasury benches bringing colour, sound and fury to their tutorials on patriotism and nationalism. While these high-decibel...

-The New Indian Express BHUBANESWAR: Eminent agricultural economist Ashok Gulati on Monday emphasised on higher growth in agriculture sector for faster reduction of poverty. Addressing the second Odisha Knowledge Hub (OKH) lecture series on ‘Getting agriculture back on track in the growth agenda of the Nation and State’ at the Secretariat here, Gulati said the agriculture sector has the potential to grow at five per cent per annum as against the present...

-The Hindu The steps taken towards social democracy are being reversed. What we have now are social insurance policies from above. This subverts the entire project of giving voice to the voiceless. India has paid a heavy price for failing to institutionalise social democracy It is generally agreed that theories of social democracy, in comparison to theories of formal political democracy, take cognisance of background inequalities that hamper the realisation of basic...