-Economic and Political Weekly An overwhelming proportion of the poor live in low-income states in India. These states are home to over two-thirds of the children in the 0–14 age group. Therefore, provision of comparable levels of basic social services and physical infrastructure is important to ensure balance and stability in the Indian federation. This underlines the importance of intergovernmental transfers. Conceptually, general purpose transfers are given to enable the states...

-The Indian Express Fixing the economy today cannot happen through consumption; revival in investment is what's desperately needed. New Delhi: Investment, unlike consumption, satisfies no immediate want. The businessman putting his money today is basically taking a bet on the future, when it would start yielding returns. Such bets are a function of the “state of confidence” at the time of investment. The investor has to be reasonably, if not absolutely,...

-The Indian Express The Indian Express checked one of the websites, which was found to be active hours after the arrests. Investigation into two women arrested for allegedly duping more than 350 people on the pretext of providing health insurance at a low premium has revealed they were procuring database of customers from employees of call centres after paying 5 paise to 50 paise per contact. Last week, two women identified as...

-TheWire.in The Centre says the method will improve crop productivity and reduce input costs, but it remains unclear which scientific studies – if any – these conclusions are derived from. New Delhi: During her budget speech in July, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman responded to widespread farmers’ distress by saying that they would be encouraged to adopt a ‘zero budget’ technique that would take India’s agriculture sector ‘back to basics’. Zero-budget natural farming...

-The Hindu * Will this form of chemical-free agriculture increase farmers’ incomes? Where are the pitfalls? The story so far: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman thrust zero budget farming into the spotlight in the first Budget speech of the 17th Lok Sabha earlier this month, calling for a “back to the basics” approach. She said, “We need to replicate this innovative model through which in a few States, farmers are already being trained...