-The Indian Express The Centre is pushing and many states are implementing Direct Benefit Transfers – and encountering little political opposition The entire focus on ushering in a direct benefit transfer (DBT) regime for delivering subsidies to the targeted populations has so far centered around cooking gas, and to some extent, on isolated pilot experiments with food subsidy. Agriculture subsidies, especially on inputs other than fertilisers, have largely escaped attention in...

-The Times of India NAGPUR: "Farmers need to increase their land holdings to at least 10-12 acres in order to earn a decent income from agriculture. Unfortunately, not many farmers in the state own land up to this level," said Sukhdeo Thorat, the chairman of Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR). Thorat, who was speaking at a seminar on farm crisis organized by Dr Ambedkar Agricos Association of India, said the...

-Hindustan Times India will celebrate the 100th anniversary of its independence without all its children in school, according to a Unesco report. The Global Education Monitoring report of Unesco has said India can achieve universal primary education by 2050, universal lower secondary education by 2060 and universal upper secondary education by 2085. This is a sad commentary because at governmental level India has tried to universalise primary education though the funds...

-Frontline Medecins Sans Frontieres warns that the free or regional trade agreements that are being negotiated, which seek to strengthen current patent regimes, are a potential threat to the developing world’s access to life-saving drugs, which it sources mostly from India. WHEN NELSON MANDELA’S GOVERNMENT passed the Medicines and Related Substances Control Act in 1997 to make medicines more accessible to the poor, 39 big pharmaceutical companies filed law suits in...

Rising prices of dal: How to deal with it? The 68th session of the United Nations General Assembly declared 2016 as the International Year of Pulses. In India, however, ordinary citizens are under enormous duress due to the skyrocketing prices of dal/ lentils since the last one year. The website of Price Monitoring Cell of the Department of Consumer Affairs shows that dal prices varied across places. For example, the...