-Livemint.com Some perspectives on the issue seem to paper over the problem and get into comparisons There is much discourse on both the issue of agrarian distress and farmer suicides. However, there have been some arguments that seem to paper over the problem and get into comparisons—that the people who committed suicide just happened to be farmers; that they were not poor; that (as argued by Shamika Ravi of Brookings India) the...

-The Indian Express Insecurity, more than poverty or indebtedness, is the key economic issue that politicians must address If social inequality is the most acutely felt social problem in India, insecurity, more than poverty, is the most acutely felt economic problem. While most measures suggest that only around one-fifth of the population today is under the official poverty line, large sections of those even much above that line are subject to...

-The Indian Express In the recent exercise, state governments, tasked with verifying 54,929 manual scavengers identified across 170 select districts in stage one of the counting process, have confirmed involvement of only 25,015 people in the job in the final verification stage. New Delhi: State governments have denied the existence of more than half the number of people identified as being involved in manual scavenging in the course of a Central...

-Livemint.com Despite the rush in the construction of toilets since the launch of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan’s launch on 2 October, India has the highest rate of open defecation in the world The Swachh Bharat Mission hopes to make India open-defecation free by October 2019. But, despite the rush in the construction of toilets since the scheme’s launch, India has the highest rate of open defecation in the world. According to a new...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Amid a flurry of farm loan waivers, financial institution Nabard has written to states advising them to ensure that dues of banks that actually write-off the loan are immediately cleared to ensure that the credit cycle is not broken. The move follows the experience of several lenders in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, where the dues have remained pending although they had written off the loans...