-Hindustan Times Bhopal: Madhya Pradesh’s first “cashless” village is actually “waterless”, prompting villagers to adopt a novel initiative of sourcing water through rooftop water pipes from tubewells located in their agricultural fields 1,000 to 2,000 feet away. Thick black water pipes running over the rooftops and treetops in the village, coming from the agriculture fields might be mistaken as electric wires at first sight. “We don’t care about cashless status as our...

-Hindustan Times The last few weeks have seen a spate of government notifications making Aadhaar mandatory for receiving the benefits of government programmes. The most recent orders relate to an Aadhaar requirement for children to access schools (even under their fundamental right to education), mid-day meals, supplementary nutrition (ICDS) and scholarships. These directives raise a number of ethical as well as practical questions, besides violating children’s right to education, nutrition and...

-Hindustan Times A potentially “politically-damaging” report on farmer suicides in Punjab will now be released only after the election results on March 11. The state government had commissioned three state universities — Punjab Agricultural University (PAU), Ludhiana; Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar and Punjabi University, Patiala — to study cases of farmer suicides between April 2010 and March 2013. The three had earlier examined cases from 2000 to 2010 for compensation and...

-Hindustan Times New Delhi: India’s economic growth of 7% during October-December has sparked a debate on how output grew so fast at a time when the country was facing its biggest-ever cash crunch after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced on November 8 the demonetisation exercise, which weeded out 86% of the currency notes in circulation. Economists and experts cite at least five reasons why the government data of a robust economic growth...

-The Hindu Under a searing sun, the Agariyas continue to make salt in the Little Rann of Kutch just as their ancestors have done down the ages A pair of black gum boots stands in the corner of Dhirubhai’s temporary shack, his home for eight months in the Little Rann of Kutch. The shack, built entirely of jute bags and plastic sheets and propped up by bamboo poles, houses nine members of...