-The Hindu Trust in official statistics is vital for democracy — the new policy must avoid centralisation David Spiegelhalter, president of Royal Statistical Society in the U.K., gave a most unusual presidential address in 2017. Instead of talking about esoteric statistical techniques, he talked about declining trust in numbers in a post-truth society bombarded by fake news and alternative facts. He recommended to the statistical community that the best way of inspiring...

-India Water Portal The editor of a new book that lays out alternative futures for India discusses India, democracy and development with a noted journalist. Alternative Futures: India Unshackled is a new book that dares to imagine what India could be. Published by Authors Upfront, 35 author-activists, researchers and thinkers have drawn upon their experiences to write on alternative political, ecological, economic and sociocultural scenarios that will benefit India in its...

-The Hindu Business Line Informal networks play a key role in building a trust mechanism that dispels the fear in rebels to quit insurgency groups How do rebels quit armed groups and return to the same political processes they had once sought to overthrow? A lot has been written on why men and women rebel. But we know very little about why and how rebels quit. This is, however, a predominant concern...

-Scroll.in It is important that forest policies are formulated through a gender-sensitive lens and that women are included in the conversation. A few weeks ago, when Google India marked the 45th anniversary of the Chipko movement with a doodle, it was a refreshing flashback to forest communities sacrificing their lives to protect trees from being felled for timber use. One of the first such recorded community protests was at Khejarli village in...

-The Hindu Farmers’ protests interrogate the reigning development model.   Alternatives do exist The recent spate of peasant protests across wide swathes of the country points sharply to the unjust folly and sheer unviability of the path of development that India has embraced, especially in the reform era since the late 1980s. Even, say, a modest food critic in metropolitan India collects an immodest annual pay package which can easily go into seven figures....